Welcome to our Irish Sport Social Media Report for June 2018. In this monthly report for Sport for Business, Sportego looks at how active Irish Sporting organisations were in the past month, the social platforms used and the engagement achieved.
The total social following for the 25 sporting bodies monitored across Instagram, Facebook Twitter and Pinterest now stands at 4.61m, an increase of 300k on May’s total, showing that there is still plenty of capacity for growth within the ‘owned media’ sector.
Special Olympics Ireland are this month’s fastest growing organisation, growing their following by more than 2,500 in June, representing a 3.95% increase. The IRFU are still top of the pile following Ireland’s first ever series win in Australia, with more than 11,400 new followers joining their 1.58 million flock in June.
Cross-Channel Audience with Percentage Increase – June‘18
After a relatively quiet few months, Basketball Ireland is back on top of the ranking for output in June, with over 1,300 posts. They focused primarily on Twitter this month (79%) with the FIBA Small Countries tournament hosted in Cork as the main focus of attention. The emphasis on twitter will have consequences when we look at the engagement achieved chart but as always great work from Mary McGuire and her team.
The growth of Special Olympics Ireland as a social media force was based on the high profile hosting of the National Games in Dublin and subsequent increase in output during June.
Increasing your content five-fold is an excellent way to get noticed. As with Basketball Ireland, most of the content went to Twitter, we look forward to seeing even more growth for them as they hopefully increase their Facebook and Instagram output.
Cross-Channel Posts – June ‘18
The volume of posts and the platform used will always contribute strongly towards the overall engagement total but the content which people, like seeing, interacting with and sharing most, is, of course, winning content.
With that in mind there was only going to be one top dog for engagement in June and that is the IRFU. Their series win over Australia captured the mainstream media spotlight and the imagination of the Irish public, even with the FIFA World Cup and the GAA Championship season in full swing.
The rugby stars achieved greater engagement than all of our other Irish sporting bodies combined, but near the top of the table as you would expect are the FAI and the GAA with 308k and 136k totals respectively.
Cross-Channel Engagement Totals – June ‘18
The extraordinary scenario for the IRFU in June aside, engagement totals are particularly reliant on the relative size of each organisations social followings, so as always it is the engagement rate per post which we must analyse in order to truly assess the relative social performance of our organisations. To put it in boxing terms, this is the measuring tape we use to assess the best pound-for-pound social team in Ireland for June.
For the second consecutive month, Gymnastics Ireland scoops that award, with 1.9% engagement in June. Great work from the social team, and an indication of the quality of content they are producing for their followers.
Cross-Channel Engagement Totals – June ‘18
As an organisation posts more content, the total engagement figure will increase but the rate of engagement typically falls, as engagement is “diluted” by the number of posts. That is true for all organisations and across all three of the big platforms, but it is interesting to look at how each organisation fares in that regard.
In the following graphs, you will see the data for all of our organisations on each of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Facebook Posts Per Day & Engagement Rates – June ‘18
Instagram Posts Per Day & Engagement Rates – June ‘18
Tweets Per Day & Engagement Rates – June ‘18
In June, there were nine organisations that achieved more than a million eyeballs on their Twitter content, up from eight accounts in May. Indeed, Hockey Ireland narrowly missed out on making it a “Terrific Ten” to remember.
Cricket Ireland again maximised their following in June, with mentions from several massive bodies.
Another mention has to go to both Basketball Ireland and Special Olympics Ireland who had a combined potential Twitter reach of 11.86m, all with only 10.3k and 14.3k unique followers respectively.
Top Twitter Mentions of Organisations – June ‘18
Niall Horan is becoming something of a regular inhabitant of our top mentioners listing, with a mention from the pop star ensuring that a sports organisation’s engagement figures only point in one direction. In June his tweet tagging Irish Rugby would have been viewed by a large quantity of his 40m+ strong Twitter following.
Top Mentioners – June ‘18
This report 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.
