Arsenal’s marketing manager and head of social media, Charles Allen, has told the Financial Times, ‘We’re refocusing our whole membership strategy away from the UK market.’ Social media are key to getting ‘100m people inside the Emirates on matchdays.’
Arsenal now has a digital matchday programme available for £3 as an iPad app, the same price as the print programme. It has been downloaded an average of 5,000 times per match, compared with sales of 12,500 per match for the print programme.
Arsenal’s marketing manager and head of social media, Charles Allen, has told the Financial Times, ‘We’re refocusing our whole membership strategy away from the UK market.’ Social media are key to getting ‘100m people inside the Emirates on matchdays.’
Arsenal now has a digital matchday programme available for £3 as an iPad app, the same price as the print programme. It has been downloaded an average of 5,000 times per match, compared with sales of 12,500 per match for the print programme.
Arsenal fans seem quite tuned in electronically. The club has 1.9m Twitter followers, the most of any team in England (Chelsea are second with 1.6m). Wikio Blog Ranking lists five Arsenal-specific sites among their top 20 football blogs. Chelsea, Manchester United, Sunderland and Tottenham Hotspur occupy one place each (the rest are general interest blogs).
Arsenal see China’s 1 billion plus population as the biggest untapped football market. To attract Chinese followers, Arsenal display posts from Chinese social networking sites on its electronic advertising boards during games. They did this when they played Manchester United at the Emirates last season, which coincided with Chinese new year. In the past five months, Arsenal have attracted 920,000 followers on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. However, Manchester City have 2.5m Weibo followers.
With fans tweeting away whenever there is a key moment or incident, the capacity of fixed mobile networks at stadiums to deal with their digital needs is a real problem. Real Madrid and Barcelona have already optimised their stadiums with suitable wi-fi connections, but even more has been done at the latest generation of stadiums in the United States.
A dozen teams in the NFL have given their fans the option of using Fan Vision, a handheld device that only works in stadiums and offers several live feeds from different angles during games, as well as real-time statistics.
Of course, it may be that watching football in the pre-Twitter, pre-smartphone age had an enviable simplicity about it,