As previewed last week the Lions took on the Eagles in an online fan battle.

In the Maroon Corner

Lions Preview: Lions fire up the Digital Pride, find the Lions on Facebook and on Twitter @BrisbaneLions

See their Digital Cheer Squad in action Brisbane Lions with Digital Pride

In the Blue & Gold Corner

Eagle Preview: Eagles call for Swoopers, find the Eagles on Facebook and Twitter @WestCoastEagles

West Coast Eagles with The Swoop have developed strong digital cheer squads using Sports DP.

Tune in for the #DigiBattle results show

The battle was scored over five categories using analytics from Facebook, Twitter & stats from Sports DP.

Download the presentation – PDF form

Agree with the result?

Let us know in the comments or send a tweet to @SportsDP or @SportsGeekHQ

Video Transcription

Welcome, my name is Sean Callanan. Here we are looking at the digibattle between the Brisbane Lions and the West Coast Eagles. What I want to take you through here is how we came up with digibattle, how we measured it, and how we used different tools to measure the results from the digibattle.
First of all, a little background on how we’re going to run the digibattle. The digibattle is run within Sports DP. Sports DP in 140 characters grades our fan social media activity based on the support they show for your team, so we’re able to develop rules specifically for the Brisbane Lions fans and for the West Coast Eagles fans to encourage their fans to be better fans of the team, and we do that by scoring their activity on both Facebook and Twitter.
Let’s have a look at the teams as they stand so far. First of all, the West Coast Eagles rolled out the Swoop in last year’s final series. They currently have a whole bunch of fans in there creating a lot of activity. This site is available on the West Coast Eagles’ site so it’s embedded into their page, and they just recently, the Brisbane Lions also rolled out a version of Sports DP and they named it Digital Pride.
So we’re going to look at the stats that came out of the results both of the Swoop and the Digital Pride. Let’s have a look at how they match up in Facebook and Twitter.

West Coast Eagles way out in front, smashed through the 100,000 Facebook fan barrier earlier this year. The Brisbane Lions are just starting to develop their fan base, and were just lucky enough to, only a couple of weeks ago, get passed the 50,000 barrier, but what we do is we actually do adjust the posts to make sure this is a fair fight.

On the Twitter side of things, again the Eagles have been pushing their social media platforms a little bit longer than the Brisbane Lions and as such they have over 15,000 Twitter followers. The Lions growing steadily at nearly 9,000 Twitter followers.

So let’s have a look at what we measured and what were the key criteria for the digibattle. The first one was measuring the fan participation inside the Sports DP platform, and what we saw over the weekend was a big increase in fan activity where fans were tweeting more, retweeting more, liking a lot more activity on Facebook, sharing posts, sharing content, and liking posts on Facebook.

The win this weekend has to go to the Brisbane Lions. They saw a 7.97 percent increase in the points per fan. The Eagles, their activity was also up, up to 5 percent, but the win for this category has to go to the Brisbane Lions, as their fans became more active over the weekend.

Our second criteria was Facebook pregame likes, and this was a comprehensive win to the West Coast Eagles where they got 3,612 likes on their pregame posts. The Brisbane Lions only got 323. We adjusted that to match the two Facebook numbers, but the Brisbane Lions have only been using the pregame posts in the last four weeks, so it was a decided advantage for the West Coast Eagles. The West Coast Eagles fans know how to really rally around that post before the game, and a comprehensive win there for the West Coast Eagles.

Next we pit the Facebook mascots against one another with Bernie Vegas and Rick the Rock, both having Facebook pages, so what we did is we developed a rule inside Sports DP to encourage the fans of West Coast and of the Brisbane Lions to also like their mascot. And the results out of Sports DP see that 9 percent of Rick the Rocks’ fan base actually comes from Sports DP, and even though the Brisbane Lions’ fans have only been on the Digital Pride for only three weeks, 6.74 of the fans for Bernie have actually come from Sports DP. And what we will see is we’ll see the engagement with those mascot pages grow over time.

The West Coast Eagles’ Rick the Rock page, for instance, average of ten engagement actions per fan via the fans that are connected via Sports DP, so they’re really providing a lot of engagement for what really is a niche Facebook page for the West Coast Eagles. So Rick the Rock gets the win in this category.

The next thing we looked at was Twitter and how we were measuring the specific team hashtags. So for the Lions it’s #golions and for the Eagles it’s #goeagles. Very simple, uncomplicated game day hashtags that pretty much reflect what the fans are yelling out in the stands. We ran a tweet-reach report over the tweets for the weekend. We saw that 588 West Coast Eagles’ fans tweeted #goeagles, and we saw that 465 Lions fans tweeted #golions.
And so it was very important to see, one, that there were more fans doing it. I think that’s more important than the actual number of tweets because you can get one or two people that do a lot of tweets and if you’re effectively just counting tweets it’s not a fair indication of your base.

So when we look at that fan base compared to their number of followers we see that the Brisbane Lions get the win with over 5 percent of their fan base contributing over the weekend to the hashtag #golions, with the Eagles at around 4 percent.

What was interesting though is inside Sports DP both were over 35 percent in the amount of fans that were active in Sports DP using the hashtags. So we can see that Sports DP is developing that digital cheer squad and is alerting more fans to be using the game day hashtag.

But from a Twitter battle, the Brisbane Lions get the win, and they would’ve been encouraged with the two point victory, which would’ve probably sparked a few more people tweeting after such a big win like that.

And the last one that we were encouraging in Sports DP is to encourage the fans to retweet and amplify the team account, and so from the stats from Sports DP we had 131 fans from the West Coast Eagles retweeting West Coast Eagles tweets over the weekend, and we had 60 of the Brisbane Lions fans retweeting the Brisbane Lions accounts over the weekend.

Now, again, as a percentage of the amount of fans that are in Lions Pride and that are in the Swoop we give the victory to the Brisbane Lions because one in four people that have scored their tweets and scored their Facebook actions in Sports DP, one in four of those started retweeting the Brisbane Lions, and this was definitely a cross-correction behavior. When we first did the initial stats of the Brisbane Lions Twitter account, the fans weren’t retweeting the Brisbane Lions at all. There were a lot of replies. There were mentions obviously of the Brisbane Lions, but they weren’t really amplifying the Brisbane Lions account. So there were some technical changes in the voice and the way that the posts were put up on the Brisbane Lions’ Twitter account to make them more retweetable. And again with a big victory comes lots of retweets, and the Brisbane Lions were lucky enough to have their largest retweeted tweets over the weekend, which again would’ve contributed to the win in this battle. But 25 percent of the fans in Sports DP had retweeted Brisbane Lions, and nearly 20 percent of the fans in the West Coast Eagles the Swoop retweeted the West Coast Eagles.

So our final tally, much like the game itself, was a three-two split, with the Brisbane Lions getting a close victory and taking the points in the digibattle. We look forward to seeing how the fans continue to engage with the Brisbane Lions and the West Coast Eagles in Digital Pride and the Swoop.

If you want any more information about Sports DP, about how to turn your fans into a band of evangelists, a brand of evangelists, even, and how to drive your fans to social actions, get them to do what you want them to do, and what you can do with Sports DP to develop that digital cheer squad to promote your team, get your message out there, and train your fans in the actions that you want them to do. The fans love seeing their names in lights, especially their ranking back on your websites, so it always drives traffic back and allows you to now run social promotions to get your fans to be the key drivers for those social promotions, which sponsors love. It obviously builds your talking about these numbers in Facebook and does have the ability to connect your sponsors to that digital fan base when we can roll out a sponsored rule to ask the fans to like or promote a sponsor promotion that you’re trying to do with a simple tweet or a Facebook share.

If you want any more information, please give me a call. You can tweet me @seancallanan or go to sportsgeekhq and fill in the contact form or check out sportsdigitalpassion.com for any more information.

Congratulations to the Brisbane Lions for the win in the digibattle, and I look forward to our next digibattle using Sports DP.

As discussed on Harf Time