England Football Fans Most Active On Social Media

English World Cup fans are the most active on social networks, with an average of 17,729 re-tweets a day and about 57.7 million views on YouTube. This gives England a ‘starscore’ of 334,017, according to calculations by Starcount, a research company focused on fan sentiments and statistics.

The Drum cited Starcount chief executive Drew Thomson as saying that the research had shown the English fan base to be global. This is an important insight for marketers as this is the first World Cup to receive so much attention from so many social media channels. The implications for marketers are obvious- they can tailor specific campaigns targeting football audiences before and after every match, when social activity is at its highest. Starcount collates its information from the social media activity of 1.7 billion users of the 12 major social networks.

Separate research carried out by Edelman has revealed that more than half of viewers tend to multi-screen while watching a television programme in order to share or comment on information related to what’s on TV. With sporting events, 39% of Britons said they multi-screen while watching. The figure is 32% for entertainment events, with 21% sharing opinions about an entertainment event online in a bid to warn others if it does not live up to expectations.

The other primary reason for sharing entertainment content in the case of UK viewers is simply to express an opinion about it. Interestingly, when it comes to preferred devices for consuming entertainment content, smartphones are at the bottom of the list for Britons, with just 8% saying they prefer to watch entertainment programmes on such devices. TV, on the other hand, is still going strong and is the most preferred channel for viewing entertainment shows, with 32% of respondents in the Edelman study saying so.