Irish Sport Social Reach Report

This month in the Irish Sport social reach report, produced for Sport for Business members by Sportego, we look at the social reach of the main governing bodies of Irish sports teams and also the growth they have seen since July.

Taking into account the recent success of the Ireland national team at the Rugby World Cup in England, it is no surprise that the official Facebook stream of the IRFU is close to becoming the first Irish sporting organisation to reach 500,000 followers.
The official page grew 5.57% in the last month as Irish fans took to the channel to follow the build-up of the games. The Twitter page also saw impressive growth as it grew 7.59% to 411,000 followers.
The growth puts Irish Rugby’s governing body well ahead of their peers in overall terms with the next biggest social reach that of Cricket Ireland.
Cricket’s popularity has grown in recent years and the governing body now has a bigger reach on Facebook and Twitter than that of the GAA and FAI.
A significant proportion of these followers are from outside Ireland with the Irish cricket ‘story’ resonating well in markets around the world where the sport is massive.
The GAA will take note of the value of this overseas impact, having highlighted international expansion into key overseas markets as a mainstay of their future development plans.
Since our initial report in July, Cricket Ireland’s social reach has grown over 10%, more than each of their rivals.

However when it comes to overall reach, Irish Rugby and its four provinces continue to lead the way with an online reach on Facebook and Twitter of 1.825 million.

This is some 1.2 million more than reach of the FAI and the SSE Airtricity teams but it is worth noting the power of success and the potential of what the FAI could achieve in the next nine months if securing qualification for the European Championships.

Driven by the win over Germany the FAI’s total social reach grew by 9.7% in October to date, well ahead of any other of the major sports.

At individual club and province level there some notable milestones were achieved.

Shamrock Rovers became the first SSE Airtricity League side to reach 50,000 followers on Facebook, Munster Rugby broke 140,000 Twitter followers, while Dublin GAA continued their excellent growth on social media growing by over 7% to 107,000.

This research and report is produced by Sportego.ie, the fan engagement company. If you would like to know more about the figures and numbers included here or indeed, more about us, get in touch with Trev@sportego.ie