IN THE PICTURE
AN ANALYSIS OF YOUR TWITTER FOLLOWERS
GOALBALL UK
ANALYSIS OF TWITTER FOLLOWERS
In this presentation we have analysed your Twitter followers to understand your performance in attracting followers over time and trends in the number of followers you share with other sports related bodies. We have also plotted the network of accounts that are important and influential to your followers.
This information will help your marketing and social media teams to build engagement and will be of interest to all in your organisation who are keen to grow the sport.
The data in this presentation is a light touch review. It provides solid business insights in summary form. We would be pleased to put together something more detailed and bespoke for you.
FOLLOWERS OVER TIME
The graphic shows the number of new followers on Twitter for each year since 2011.
The number of new followers each year has stayed reasonably consistent over the last few years. There have been a couple of exceptions to this trend in 2020 and 2021. The dip in 2020 is explainable by Covid but the 2021 dip is more of a concern as it was a Paralympic year.
We usually see a spike in new followers in an Olympic and Paralympic year but it seems that Goalball doesn't get this bounce as the number for 2021, and indeed 2016, was less than the previous year.
2022 was, however, a good year for new followers with the number similar to the previous highs recorded in 2014 and 2015.
ASSOCIATED ACCOUNTS
This chart shows the number of your new followers who also follow other sports related organisations.
The graphic shows that the number of new followers with shared interests in other sports peaked in 2015 followed by a fall off.
Athletics, football, wheelchair basketball and boccia are all sports that are also popular among your followers.
Cross pollination with other sports is important because research shows that people who are already engaged with one sport or more likely to become engaged with another, compared with those who follow no sports. Appealing to people who follow other sports is a good way to promote participation in your sport.
NETWORK ANALYSIS
We' ve mapped who your Twitter followers also follow to produce a network analysis. A network analysis is a graphical representation of the relationships between nodes (in this case Twitter accounts) and the lines that connect them (in this case shared followers) known as edges.
Network analysis is used to understand the relationships between organisations. By graphing the connections between them we can see which accounts are the most important to people in the network. The size of the node reflects how many connections the account has. The bigger the node the more connections. The width of the edge represents the number of that account's followers that are shared with the account it connects to. The thicker the line the greater the number of shared Twitter followers. The network also identifies clusters of accounts that have things in common.
From this we can assess which types of accounts are the most influential over the network. The analysis is important because information tends to flow through the most influential accounts.
To be included in the network, the number of shared followers must represent a reasonable proportion of both yours and their total followers. This means that accounts such as Barack Obama and Gary Lineker, who have millions of followers, are not included in the network because although a lot of your followers also follow them, the number of followers you share with them is a very small proportion of their total followers. The accounts that we include in the network are, therefore, defined as the most relevant to you.
ANALYISNG THE NETWORK
Hover over an individual account to view its connections. Zoom in to show specific parts of the network. Zoom out to show the overall network. Use the 🔄 button to reset the view.
On the Community tab you will see three communities denoted by different colours.
The 1st community, in purple, consists of goalball clubs, athletes and officials.
The 2nd, in the blue, is predominantly organisations relating to blindness and visual impairment.
The 3rd community, presented in light green, consists primary of organisations and people who advocate for the visually impaired and provide services.
Goalball UK is presented in red.
We also provide an analysis by gender. The followers of goalball clubs, athletes and officials skews to male with the other communities skewing more to females.
THE KEY TAKE AWAYS
- Currently you have just under 4,000 Twitter followers and a reasonably stable rate of new followers. There's an opportunity here to engage with people (including the parents of children) who might be interested in goalball. You don't seem to have an Paralympic year bounce and so developing a social media strategy for increasing the number of new followers every year, at a higher level than the existing trend, would help raise awareness and participation in the sport.
- The make up of your network shows communities representing diverse interests and these could be leveraged to generate marketing content that will appeal to followers, existing and new.
- It would be useful to strengthen your alignment with other sports to build on a shared interest in sport with their followers, which in turn can help you grow. Athletics and football as well the Paralympic sports of wheelchair basketball and boccia are particularly popular with your followers and represent a good starting point.