Ireland’s historic Grand Slam win against England on St Patrick’s Day captured the imagination of the nation. The TV viewing audience likely to have been in the region of one million and while that is the main driver of how people experienced the win, it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ways in which people engaged with the game.

The total reach of such engagement across all social media and devices on Saturday afternoon was as high as 32 million and this morning we can bring you visibility on how that was achieved.

On March 17th 2018 between 10am and 10pm, The Brand Fans in partnership with Engager monitored social media activity for rugby in Ireland.

There were 22,022 mentions of rugby hashtags and keywords during this period. 11,970 of these were original mentions reaching a potential audience of 19,700,373. In addition, 11,956 unique profiles made a total of 10,052 reshares spreading the mentions to an additional 32,223,561 people.

Now someone who might have seen a social post versus someone who was there or was tuned in to watch on television is on a vastly different level in terms of the engagement and the potential value but in a fractured world of messages and impact on sentiment, the social metrics are very measurable and it is of interest to look at them in a comparitive sense.

Social mentions peaked at full time and the IRFU’s Grand Slam winning post was the most popular of the day with 4,557 retweets. The post with the most reach came from @WWESheamus with over 4.9 million.

Of the 22,022 mentions analysed, approximately 7,252 mentions (33%) were positive, and 715 mentions (3%) were negative. 14,055 mentions (64%) were classified as neutral. ‘Scummy Irish’ featured strongly in the negative mentions.

25-34 year olds were the most active at 42% with 35-44 year olds at 29%.

The top Influencer was The Irish Times with 425,126 followers and an influencer score of 92 followed by Irish Rugby, with a score of 91. Aer Lingus, Leinster, Munster and TV3 also feature in the top 10 influencers.

Vodafone was the most mentioned sponsor with 3,069 mentions of #teamofus during the day. Aer Lingus had the most spread post of the day. ‘It’s a Green Slam’ spread to 3,844,137 additional people.

The Brand Fans are leading sponsorship and brand engagement specialists, and long time members of the Sport for Business community. They are passionate about brand engagement and we believe in the power of sponsorship to create long-term powerful connections. Sponsorship Performance and Impact (SPi) is The Brand Fans propritary model which examines the value, health and commercial impact of sponsor brands or rights holders. www.thebrandfans.com

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