We plotted out every team’s fan count, engagement rate (social metrics), win/loss record, average attendance, merchandise sales, and the population of the city the team plays in (real-world data), looking for correlations and patterns. Ultimately, the best metric was the ratio of average attendence to fan count, though looking at Merchandise sales and standings was also enlightening: The Yankees have the most fans by far (8,474,881). This is not surprising. They have the biggest city (pop. 8,175,133), the highest merchandise sales, and the third best record in the league (60.3%), and have been a consistenly winning team for generations.
The Nationals have the least fans (230,581), which is somewhat surprising, considering they have the fourth best record (58.5%) and a relatively big population (601,723, compared to say, St. Louis’ population of 319,294).
There is no significant difference in the frequency or quality of the posts made by the Yankees and the Nationals.
The teams with the best merchandise sales (New York and Boston) are also the two pages with the most fans, and have the best attendance-fans ratio (0.5 : 100 and 0.7 : 100, respectively; the average is 1 : 25).-With very few discrepencies, the top ten teams that sold the most merchandise correspond with the ten teams with most fans (I.e. NY is #1 in merch sales and in fans, etc.).-Teams with inflated fan counts (NY, Boston, SF, etc.) likely have many fans that don’t live where the team plays.
The ratio of Yankees fans to Mets fans (8,474,881 : 626,869) is far more extreme than the ratio of average attedance (41,570 : 27,458).Team pages do a good job of posting photos, questions, short messages, occasional contests, videos, etc. One possible area of improvement would be to focus more on posting before a game than only doing recap posts.The team with the highest engagement by far is the Dodgers, who have won 61.8% of their games this season. The teams with the next highest engagement rates, the Mets and the Angels, are not ranked as well this year (both currently at 53.6%).
There seems to be a stronger connection in the fact that two of the teams with the best engagement rates are the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels (37.2% and 26.8% respectively). The Mets have a 27.5% engagement rate, and it can be presumed that the Yankees’ highly inflated fan count leads to low engagement. Most of the teams with above-average engagements rates are among the larger cities in the league (LA, New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Fort Worth).
There are of course, large cities with poor engagement (Toronto or San Diego, for example), but the only real standout is the smallest city in the league, Pittsburgh, with a high engagement rate.of 27.7%, the 6th highest in the league.
The Dodgers are third in merchandise sales, but other high sellers have poor engagement rates such so that the metrics don’t correlate. Boston, number 2 in merch sales is third to last in fan engagement.
We compared attendance to population, and then compared that to engagement, but data did not correlate well.
There seems to be a difference between people who go to games and people who engage on Facebook. For instance, Atlanta is a small city (pop. 420,003, the 9th smallest in the league) with high average attendance (29,852, well over the league average), and yet the team’s page has an engagement rate of 11.21%- far from remarkable. Cincinnati is another example. They have a killer attendance-population ratio (27,163 : 296,943) and has the second worst engagement in the league- 1.62%.
If you’re a data monkey and would like to see the numbers for yourself, You can check it out here. You can also check out the technology we used to get these numbers and get your free trial over at Blitzmetrics.com
Credit unions tend to have fewer fans than large national banks making higher engagement rates easier to attain. 8 of the top 10 in terms of fan count are banks.
Chase: 3,364,793 fans, Capital One: 2,556,273 fans, American Express: 2,470,220 fans
These three banks account for about 85% of the market share
Since engagement percent is calculated with fan count in the denominator, smaller pages tend to have higher engagement.
YOUR Community Credit Union with 39.01%, while TDECU has 23.89%
Banks hold the top seven spots for highest Share of Voice (% of interactions across the industry).
Citi has 22.41% SOV, BOA has 16.8% SOV although it should be noted that BOA suffers from more negative sentiment than most other banks. Wells Fargo is at 15.92% after that there is a steep decline; American Express has 8.33% SOV.
Which is better: Fan count or engagement?
Catch 22. We want to raise both!
Use sponsored stories to:
Page Like Story: Build fan base
Page Post Ad: Push good content to friends of fans.
Content:
Most of these banks heavily rely on pictures and questions that encourage users to respond. Both banks and credit unions try to show that they support their local communities by giving away scholarships or sponsoring some charitable events or functions.
The biggest difference between banks and credit unions is the more socially successful credit unions generally offer far more incentives like giveaways and other promotional strategies that are then publicized on the wall for the whole community to see. Trips to Hawaii, $1,000 giveaways every day, etc, can be very powerful tools to foster community online.
Customer Relationship Management:
Complaints, even in financial institutions that are thriving in social media, are commonplace throughout the industry.
The faster a customer service representative responds to complaints, the better.
YOUR credit union has an average response time of 21.36 minutes
Usually complaints are responded to in the first hour. Otherwise others tend to jump in and express their dissatisfaction as well.
Action:
Credit unions need more fans and banks need more interactions. The credit unions need to use ads in tandem with their giveaways to attract more fans and more account holders. Banks should take a cue from credit unions and offer better incentives for participation.