FACEBOOK CONTENT ANALYSIS
ESSENDON FOOTBALL CLUB
BY LAURA POZZOBON
INTRODUCTION The Essendon Football Club has a deep rooted history in Australian Rules Football. The team played their first VFL match in June 1873, making them one of the first Australian Rules clubs. Over their 145 year history they developed a huge and devoted fan base, that has grown to demand more interaction with the team, players and game they love. One way Essendon satisfies this demand is through their social media pages. They currently have 128K followers on Twitter and 148K followers on Instagram. Their Facebook page in particular now has more than 340,000 likes and almost 328,000 followers. In comparison, Essendon reported to have 70,638 club members in April 2018. These people could be described as ‘supporters’ by Giulianotti (2002), however although there are many of these people, Essendon also has so many more ‘Fans’ and ‘Followers’ who may not be ready, or able to, to buy a membership but are devoted enough to be connected via social media. This poses the question, what are these Essendon fans looking for on Facebook? This analysis will primarily look into Essendon’s Facebook page, their types of posts, and how fans interact with them. The posts from the week starting the 13th of August (13/8 to 20/8) will be explored to provide insight into how fans interact with content. Specifically their preferences in content categories such as news, highlights and players, as well as their preferred formats. By investigating this, Essendon will be able to apply the knowledge into posts that their fans enjoy and engage with.
328,000 followers
148,000 followers
128,000 followers
FACEBOOK DATA Table 1. FAN ENGAGEMENT WITH DIFFERENT CONTENT
Source: Essendon Football Club, Facebook page
*Total frequency = Total of likes, comments and shares for each category ** Fan Engagement Score = total freq. รท posts. This provides an average score for each content category.
Table 2. COMMUNICATION FORMAT
Source: Essendon Football Club, Facebook page
CONTENT ANALYSIS The information presented in Table 1 outlines categories of the posts from the specified week and how followers interacted with them. From this we can see that there were 34 posts between the 13th and 20th of August. Of these posts, 12 (35%) of them were ‘Team News’ posts, discussing the lineups, injuries and potential trades. This was the most posted about category. Posts about ‘Players’ (for example, Figure 1.) was the second most posted about, with 7 (20%) posts and the third most posted category was ‘Match Highlights’, with 6 (18%) posts. This shows that followers prefer to see their favourite players and content about them. This view is supported by Stavros who argues that “Sport fans, compared to casual spectators, are more likely to seek out information about their team and players” (p.456). However, although ‘Team News’ was the most posted about category, it can be seen that these posts did not receive a high frequency of likes, comments and shares (displayed in ‘Total Frequency’ column). Its frequency of 10235 was lower than the Total Frequency of ‘Players’ posts, which received a total of 13693 likes, comments and shares. This means that only 26% of all likes comments and shares were from ‘Team News’, compared to ‘Players’ posts contributing 34%. Figure 1.
Source: Essendon Football Club, Facebook page
Often the ‘Players’ posts were in an image or video format (as seen in Figure 1.), making them faster to view as users are scrolling through their newsfeed. Fewer users may want to read the article attached to the ‘Team News’ posts, which was often a link connecting to their website. This may be one reason why fans are more interested in engaging with ‘Players’ posts, despite ‘Team News’ posts also including player content. Figure 2. displays the Total Frequency data from Table 1. This clearly shows that ‘Game info/stats’, ‘Team News’ and ‘Players’ had higher than average interaction frequencies and contributed more to the overall likes, comments and shares count (total of 39895). Figure 2. Total Frequency
The assumption that fans enjoy content with players involved is confirmed and is more clearly reflected in the ‘Fan Engagement Score’ (FES) column. This score is derived from the ‘Total Frequency’ of each category being divided by the amount of posts in that category. This allows for an understanding of how many likes, comments and shares each post on average gets in each category. This information is similarly presented in Figure 3, which shows that ‘Players’ and ‘Games info/ stats’ have higher than average Fan Engagement Scores. As stated previously, the ‘Players’ category’s success is due to fans feeling a connection with them, as well as their convenience of being predominantly video and photo formats. The ‘Game info/ stats’ categories position with the highest FES seems surprising. However, the high engagement rate may be due to the fact that they were posted during halftime, where more fans would look to social media during the break, and after games displaying results.
Figure 3. Fan Engagement Score
Table 1. also displays how little engagement fans have with the ‘Membership’ post and the ‘Food’ post. These categories only had one post throughout the week which contributes to their low frequency count. However even when comparing their Fan Engagement Scores (as seen in FIgure 3.), they score very low. For the ‘Membership’ post, this may be because only a select few followers would also be members, therefore making that content irrelevant to the rest. It could also make non-members feel insecure in their belonging as a legitimate fans if they have chosen to not purchase a membership (for example, some may not be able to afford it or cannot attend games). The ‘Food’ post similarly did not get a high frequency of engagement. This was a sponsored post that included no team players, coaches or game content, simply one of their team’s Dieticians talking through a recipe using their sponsored product ‘Rokeby Farms’ (See Figure 4.). Despite this being a giveaway post, there was little engagement.
Figure 4.
Source: Essendon Football Club, Facebook page
The Essendon Football Club’s Facebook page provides a variety of content for their followers, predominantly ‘video’ and ‘link’ posts, where fans can feel more connected to the club they love. These fans particularly enjoy posts involving their favourite players as a way of learning more about them and feeling closer to them. This is confirmed in the ‘Total Frequency’ (13693) and ‘Fan Engagement Score’ (2218) of the ‘Players category. Posts that don't include players or team information, like the ‘Membership’ and ‘ Food’, were not as successful in engaging the audience.
REFERENCES Essendon FC. 2018. Essendon membership soars above 70,000. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.essendonfc.com.au/news/2018-04-18/essendonmembership-soars-above-70000. [Accessed 23 August 2018].
Essendon Football Club Facebook Page. [Accessed from 13 August 2018]. https://www.facebook.com/EssendonFC/
Giulianotti, R., 2002. Supporters, followers, fans, and flaneurs: A taxonomy of spectator identities in football. Journal of sport and social issues, 26(1), pp.25-46.
Jacobson, B., 1979. The social psychology of the creation of a sports fan identity: A theoretical review of the literature. Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology, 5(2).
Stavros, C., Meng, M.D., Westberg, K. and Farrelly, F., 2014. Understanding fan motivation for interacting on social media. Sport management review, 17(4), pp.455469.