Welcome to our Irish Sport Social Media Report for August 2018. In this report for Sport for Business, Sportego looks at how active the Irish Sporting organisations were in the past month, the social platforms used and the engagement achieved.
The total social following for our 25 sporting bodies across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter now stands at 4.696m, a slight overall increase of 63k on July’s total.
Just as it was last month, the honour of being Ireland’s fastest growing sports organisation goes to Hockey Ireland, the World Cup success continued to deliver online, as it drove a 30.7% increase in followers. Other organisations to experience growth in excess of 2% were Ladies Gaelic (3.42%), the GAA (2.91%), Gymnastic Ireland (2.77%), Cycling Ireland (2.48%) and Rowing Ireland (2.42%).
Last month it was the GAA who topped the pile for volume of content produced with over 1200 posts, with Basketball Ireland second with 1.04k. 57.8% of the GAA’s total content was on Twitter with just 2.6% on Instagram.
The Olympic Council of Ireland produced just 23 pieces of content with Facebook output down 40% and Twitter down 23%.
Summertime in Irish sport is typically the preserve of our Gaelic games and so it is no surprise to see the GAA at the top of the pile for Engagement totals in July. Totalling all engagement actions across all social networks, they had almost 237k reactions in the past month. Facebook contributed 68k of those, Instagram almost 120k and Twitter almost 49k. As always it is intriguing to note that while only 2% of GAA posts were on Instagram, it provided 50% of the engagement.
It is no surprise given the success Limerick had in the All-Ireland Final to see that the GAA dominated the engagement totals. The GAA had a total of 261k engagements. Irish Rugby meanwhile had 134k despite being in off-season mode while Irish Hockey had 91k.
Looking at the more insight offering engagement rate per post, we have a new sheriff in town.
After three consecutive months at the top, Gymnastics Ireland have dropped to second place with Hockey Ireland moving to the top of the pile. They achieved an incredible 3.38% average engagement per post in August, a clear sign that success does indeed drive engagement. Gymnastics Ireland stay in the top 2 with 1.78% engagement.
In August, 14 of our organisations achieved more than the million potential eyeballs on their Twitter content, up from 12 accounts in July. Hockey Ireland had the greatest reach on Twitter in the month, beating out Cricket Ireland and Special Olympic Ireland. A potential 40.1M eyeballs saw Irish Hockey with 37.4M for Cricket Ireland and, by virtue of a partnership with Liverpool FC, 24.4M coming across the work of Special Olympic Ireland.
Last month the top mentioner was Kensington Palace with a 1.6m strong twitter account. This month it is the turn of perhaps a more familiar face to Irish sport fans, Liverpool FC. The Premier League side partnered with Special Olympic Ireland to deliver their message to their 24.4 million audience. The ICC gave shout outs to their 8.25M audience for Irish hockey, showing smart social skills to link back to Cricket by naming a player, Elena Tice, who had played for the Irish Women’s Cricket team. Conor McGregor also gave the Irish Hockey team his backing, delivering 6.28k engagements from his 7.22M audience.
This report was produced for Sport for Business by Sportego. This is the last month that the report will appear in this form. From September, Sportego and Sport for Business will work together to produce a more focused report on a particular channel. We will also be working with other partners to continue to bring insight on the world of social media and how it impacts on the sporting landscape.
Sportego can be contacted at Sportego.ie or @WeAreSportego on Twitter.
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