Some of you may find this interesting. So the Fire has hit 10,000 fans on Facebook, so I checked out the official Facebook pages of some other teams: Seattle Sounders - 66,835 fans Real Salt Lake - 19,780 fans Philadelphia Union - 18,036 fans Toronto FC - 12,929 fans DC United - 11,458 fans Columbus Crew -10,371 fans Chicago Fire - 10,059 fans LA Galaxy - 9,400 fans Houston Dynamo - 7,130 fans RedBull NY - 6,327 fans New England Revolution - 5,259 fans San Jose Earthquakes - 3,927 fans KC Wizz - 3,346 fans Colorado Rapids - 3,022 fans F*C* Dallas - 2,626 fans Chivas USA - 1,669 fans I think for the most part that the amount of fans each team has correlates well to where they will end up ranking attendance wise with some minor corrections and some anomalies, NY will have good attendance because of a new stadium. The SJ and KC numbers are a bit surprising. I expect the top 4 teams to be the teams at the top of the attendance table at the end of the year, ditto for the bottom 6 save Chivas who has a low number on Facebook for obvious reasons. I also think Facebook penetration also shows how well a team is being marketed, compare RSL to Colorado or NE to DC.
Seattle Seahawks 139,511 Seattle Mariners 129.307 not bad. about half way there ... pretty impressive. compared to the rest of the MLS the number is just sick ...
i have the sneaky suspicion that if AC St. Louis can draw 8-10K fans a game for the first two years and is run as a highly professional and successful NASL club they will be the 20th MLS team and enter with Montreal in 2012 or the year after in 2013. but i have to admit the AC St. Louis website looks like some grade school kids put it together ... but at least it isn't as bad as NSC Minneso....ooops i take that back they actually have a website now and not just some blank sub-page off of the NSC site. yeah, now the AC St. Louis site is pretty much the worst and gives a very unprofessional impression.
FACEBOOK FANS: MLS / USSF D2 / *(MLS 2011) 1. Seattle Sounders FC - 66,885 2. Real Salt Lake- 19,789 3. Philadelphia Union - 18,042 4. AC St. Louis - 13,155 5. Toronto FC - 12,930 6. C'bus Crew -12,902 [10,371 & 2,531 (Official FB link on club page)] 7. DC United - 11,461 8. Chicago Fire - 10,067 9. LA Galaxy - 9,417 10. Houston Dynamo - 7,130 11. RBNY - 6,331 12. PR Islanders - 5,594 *13. Portland Timbers - 5,565 14. NE Revolution - 5,259 15. SJ Earthquakes - 3,937 16. KC Wizards - 3,346 17. Colorado Rapids - 3,025 18. FC Dallas - 2,626 19. Tampa Bay Rowdies - 2,508 20. Montreal Impact - 2,091 21. Austin Aztex - 1,927 22. Rochester Rhinos - 1,889 23. Chivas USA - 1,670 24. Miami FC - 1,453 25. Carolina RailHawks - 1,268 *26.Vancouver Whitecaps - 1,019 27. CP Baltimore - 634 28. NSC Minnesota Stars - 623 TWITTER FOLLOWERS: MLS / USSF D2 / *(MLS 2011) 1. LA Galaxy - 6,283 2. DC United - 4,188 3. Chicago Fire - 3,765 4. Philadelphia Union - 3,649 5. Columbus Crew - 3,542 6. Houston Dynamo - 3,197 7. SSFC - 2,681 8. NE Revolution - 2,392 *9.Portland Timbers - 2,275 10. Real Salt Lake - 2,244 11. KC Wizards - 1,868 12. FC Dallas - 1,773 13. Colorado Rapids - 1,462 14. TFC - 1,391 *15. Vancouver Whitecaps - 1,142 16. Rochester Rhinos - 1,114 17. RBNY - 1,110 18. Tampa Bay Rowdies - 1,067 19. Miami FC - 1,010 20. SJ Earthquakes - 738 21. Chivas USA - 727 22. CP Baltimore - 493 23. AC St. Louis - 472 24. NSC Minnesota Stars - 334 25. Carolina RailHawks - 332 26. Montreal Impact - 273 27. PR Islanders - 242 28. Austin Aztex - 117
everyone in the salt lake valley seems to add RSL as a fan... but they dont come to the RioT. Pisses me off. If all of those facebook fans just showed up, we would have a full house all season and not have to push tickets so hard.
Man, I just don't think that's true. RSL has great attendance for MLS, their facebook only has ~3,000 more than RSL's avg attendance. Not everybody on that facebook page can go to every match. I think RSL does a fantastic job of promoting their club and the SLC area really latches on to the team. It took a couple shit years for it to happen, but I feel as though RSL really has grabbed onto the culture of a small market. You can't EXPECT much more out of Salt Lake than what is happening all things considered. I'd say there are 3 clubs whose attendance you can't complain about when looking at the big picture, Seattle, Toronto and Salt Lake.
see, as someone who doesnt follow the team closely I can see why you would say that. An average attendance of 16K ish is amazing considering our market size. I would agree with you except RSLFO has to push tickets like crazy. If you bought tickets to every game last season, individually, through all the deals they had, you would have saved around $100 compared to that of someone who bought season tickets in the "cheap seats". If you look at home attendance for the first 2 RSL games, it was very poor. They tried to dump tickets last minute, but it didnt work. So, being smart, they focused on pushing tickets (for a sometimes HUGE discount) for each game after that. You see attendance jump, and think its because the team was doing better... but we werent. The attendance numbers for RSL could very easily be down next season despite being champs. Ask any fan that lives in the area that follows the team closely, they will agree
Well regardless of deals that the FO puts out there, people still have to pay or show up to the match. That's enough for me if they come twice. There are plenty of things I don't waste my time with even though they are free.
what kind of fan interaction/marketing do teams do on facebook, myspace, twitter? these are key tools to reach that young audience MLS is after.
I can speak for the Fire, they do preseason live game updates via Twitter. On Facebook they regularly update with pictures from preseason training, some goofy "guess who got this haircut" picture posts, announcements about ticket deals, links to news, links to blog updates etc.
thanks. do they promote their activity in emails and on tickets and such, directing attention to their twitter and facebook accounts?
wouldn't it matter when they were made? DC has had twitter for a while but their (official) facebook is pretty recent.
Another thing to consider is how long have they been on Facebook actively. The Quakes really have been using FB for less than a year.
Interesting the difference in rankings between Facebook and Twitter. Seattle has utterly dominated FB, but is a mid level team on Twitter. Just shows that the usage of the two social networking sites is not something that correlates. Particularly the raw numbers. Twitter is far less useful that Facebook, and it shows.
well that is hardly a good excuse. ssfc has only existed as an active team for about a year. the point is any team could have been using fb or twitter for as long as they wanted ... some have and have strong online support and some haven't and thus don't.
what is really interesting is to see how prominently each team puts the links to their FB and Twitter on their team's web pages. SSFC's links are at the very bottom of the page and infinitesimally small ... very easy to miss. and FCD doesn't even have any links at all (at least that i can find). the minor league teams are about half and half when it comes to having prominent links to FB/Twitter from their home pages.
maybe i will do a monthly update on the numbers. it might be interesting to see the growth over the season. i think i will whip up a spreadsheet right now and post the new numbers again at the start of the season.