Welcome to our Irish Sport Social Media Report for April 2018. In this report for Sport for Business, Sportego looks at how active our Irish Sporting organisations were in the past month, the social platforms used and the engagement achieved.
The total Irish sport social following for our 25 sporting bodies across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and now Pinterest stands at 4.55m, up by only 10k in the past month, illustrative of what was a relatively quiet month in the world of Irish sport.
This past month saw a big change in the way Instagram allows monitoring access to account data. The key impact of the changes is that personal accounts can no longer be tracked, which has affected our graphics in relation to Sailing Ireland and the Camogie Association. We have manually assembled the *Instagram numbers for those accounts, which you will find at the bottom of this report.
Only Go Racing showed more than 2% growth, and only five other organisations showed more than 1% increase in their social followings; Ladies Gaelic, Swim Ireland, Gymnastics Ireland, Tennis Ireland and Sailing Ireland.
Cross Channel Audience with Percentage Increase – End of April‘18
Last month, the most active organisation on social media was the GAA with over 1000 posts. This month, the Ladies Gaelic team topped the table with only 702 posts. Swim Ireland actually doubled their output, but by and large our Irish organisations showed a big decrease in their volume of content.
Cross Channel Posts – End of April ‘18
The IRFU were best for Cross Channel Engagement for a fourth consecutive month. However, their engagement total of 169k was down from a massive 1.24m in March, understandable following their grand slam victory.
As we always emphasise, the sporting calendar is a cyclical one, and rises or falls in the amount of content are to be expected. What is more relevant is the engagement rate of those posts, and it is in this area that organisations strive for growth.
Cross Channel Engagement Totals – End of April ‘18
In April, Irish sporting bodies created a daily average of almost 8 posts per week, down 20% on last month. The split between the platforms was almost identical, with Twitter enjoying 62% of the activity, Facebook 31% and Instagram 7%.
As you will see in the following graphic, those utilising Instagram reap the benefits with great engagement. Twitter and Facebook combined provide almost 33 times less engagement than Instagram for similar style posts.
Posts Per Day & Engagement Rates – April ‘18
We can see that Instagram provided engagement at a rate of 2.11% per post, which is down by almost 50% from March. However it still far exceeds the engagement levels enjoyed on the other platforms. The IRFU owes 79% of its engagement total to their Instagram posts, which only constituted 12% of its total content last month. Basketball Ireland put 7% of its total social content in April on Instagram, but it accounted for 59% of its overall engagement. The trend continues throughout all organisations, regardless of the size of their social following.
While the month was comparatively quiet on social media, there were 8 organisations in April who had over a million potential eyeballs on their content. The FAI, IRFU, Cricket Ireland and the GAA were among the top mentions for the month as you would expect with their large followings, with special due to Camogie Ireland and Special Olympics Ireland who both exceeded 3m potential views on Twitter, with their own followings 17.7k and 13.6k respectively.
Top Twitter Mentions of Organisations – April ‘18
The top mentioners for Irish sporting bodies last month were as always an eclectic bunch. Top of the pile is the ICC who mentioned Irish Cricket in April, but they are joined by the UN Refugee Agency and Celtic Football Club who tagged the FAI account, and WWE star Finn Balor who brought Special Olympics Ireland to his fans attention.
Top Mentioners – End of April ‘18
*Instagram stats compiled manually:
Sailing Ireland… 32 posts, 5501 Engagement Total.
Camogie… 8 posts, 2435 Engagement Total.
This report and insight was produced exclusively for Sport for Business by Sportego. They work with sporting organisations to gain insights from their social media presence and also to optimise and benefit from their data. Check them out at Sportego.ie or get in touch @WeAreSportego on Twitter.
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