I loved the story last week about Chelsea starting to use Twitter to communicate directly with fans. Basically, Chelsea FC has begun Twittering (under its mascot’s name) following a huge growth in fake Chelsea FC accounts. I can imagine there are quite a few people out there who would love to hear the ins and outs of their clubs.
My club (Liverpool FC) were apparently the first to use it and now others appear to be springing up everywhere. Liverpool has more than 17,000 followers but it also has a number of copycat Twitter users here is one example: https://twitter.com/liverpool
My ideal job would be to do social media for a football club but it got me thinking if I could ask my football club anything on Twitter what would I ask them? More to the point would they answer it?
To be honest, these new channels will be useful but only if they are used properly and the clubs engage appropriately with their fans. For instance: why don’t they offer something special/unique to their communities like free tickets for retweeting a #hashtag competition for example? I have started to follow both today so I will be watching these two very closely.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
