IN THE PICTURE
AN ANALYSIS OF YOUR TWITTER FOLLOWERS
BADMINTON ENGLAND
ANALYSIS OF TWITTER FOLLOWERS
Analysing existing data - your own internal data, ratings and review sites or social media - can give powerful insight into the performance of an organisation.
In this presentation we have analysed your Twitter followers to understand your performance in attracting followers over time and trends in the number of followers you share with other sports related bodies. We have also plotted the network of accounts that are important and influential to your followers.
This information will help your marketing and social media teams to build engagement and will be of interest to all in your organisation who are keen to grow the sport.
The data in this presentation is a light touch review. It provides solid business insights in summary form. We would be pleased to put together something more detailed and bespoke for you.
PARTICIPATION RATES
Before analysing your Twitter followers it is important to look at the trends in participation rates as this will place greater context onto the analysis that follows.
Data from Sport England's Active Lives Survey shows that participation by adults at least once in the last 12 months has fallen from a high of 7.1% in 2016/17 to 5.5% in 2021/22. Regular participation has also declined slightly in the last few years. Clearly, the pandemic hit participation rates but levels of participation had been in decline prior to the pandemic.
The participation rate among children is much healthier. The 2021/22 academic year results show that 5.3% of children played in the last week. Among boys the rate was 5.5% and for girls 4.9%.
Participation rates for children have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
FOLLOWERS OVER TIME
The graphic shows the number of new followers on Twitter for each year since 2011.
The chart shows that there was a huge spike in new followers following the 2016 Olympics when GB achieved a bronze in the men's doubles and again in 2017 when the World Championships were held in Scotland. England got a bronze in the mixed doubles at this event.
There was a slight uplift in 2020 during lockdown (which we have also seen for some other sports) and in the lead up to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 but nothing like that seen in 2016.
The challenge for Badminton England is to increase the annual number of new followers at a higher rate than currently. It's important to gain an increasing number of followers because it exposes more people to the game which in turn increases engagement and participation.
ASSOCIATED ACCOUNTS
This chart shows the number of new followers who also follow other sports bodies.
It shows that there has been a sharp decline in the number of new followers who follow other national sporting bodies. Keep in mind that, apart from 2016 and 2017, the number of new followers has been generally quite steady, therefore the drop off means that your new followers have less interest in other local sports. In fact, when we look at the most important accounts that your followers also follow, we see that a lot of them are not UK based. This is picked up in the description of your network (see below).
This lack of cross pollination of sports is important because it makes it harder to attract new followers who in turn could take up the sport.
NETWORK ANALYSIS
We' ve mapped who your Twitter followers also follow to produce a network analysis. A network analysis is a graphical representation of the relationships between nodes (in this case Twitter accounts) and the lines that connect them (in this case shared followers) known as edges.
Network analysis is used to understand the relationships between organisations. By graphing the connections between them we can see which accounts are the most important to people in the network. The size of the node reflects how many connections the account has. The bigger the node the more connections. The width of the edge represents the number of that account's followers that are shared with the account it connects to. The thicker the line the greater the number of shared Twitter followers. The network also identifies clusters of accounts that have things in common.
From this we can assess which types of accounts are the most influential over the network. The analysis is important because information tends to flow through the most influential accounts.
To be included in the network, the number of shared followers must represent a reasonable proportion of both yours and their total followers. This means that accounts such as Barack Obama and Gary Lineker, who have millions of followers, are not included in the network because although a lot of your followers also follow them, the number of followers you share with them is a very small proportion of their total followers. The accounts that we include in the network are, therefore, defined as the most relevant to you.
ANALYISNG THE NETWORK
Hover over an individual account to view its connections. Zoom in to show specific parts of the network. Zoom out to show the overall network. Use the 🔄 button to reset the view.
On the Community tab you will see three communities denoted by different colours.
The 1st community, in purple, is predominantly badminton players from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan.
The 2nd, in the green colour, is a combination of news, media and sports bodies from Indonesia.
The 3rd community, presented in the blue colour, consists of a combination of English sports bodies, the Olympics, USA Badminton and international badminton players primarily from India.
Badminton England is presented in red.
We also show a split in the network by gender. Most of the big accounts in your network skew to males.
THE KEY TAKE AWAYS
- The pronounced skew towards accounts from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand among your new followers shows that your network is moving away from British sports towards international badminton accounts.
- Having a more global following is not necessarily a bad thing because it reinforces the view that Badminton England is part of a global sport. That said, we recommend a focus on getting home based followers to be more engaged with the sport. It is important to increase your followers locally because this raises awareness of the sport and acts as a gateway to participation. Currently you have over 44,500 Twitter followers. We recommend developing a social media strategy for increasing the number of new followers every year at a higher level than the existing trend.
- It would be useful to strengthen your alignment with other national sports bodies to build on a shared interest in sport with their followers, which in turn can help you grow.