Social Media in Football: The Rise of Online-Only Platforms

Social media is perhaps the most effective self-promotion tool available for media outlets today.

Yet, while thousands still migrate to the BBC, MailOnline and Guardian Sport sections everyday for football content, new start-up companies are almost entirely reliant on social media to gain views.

“We’re nothing without our Twitter or Instagram page,” admits Harry Collins, who established RowZ in February 2018.

“We wouldn’t even exist as we’d have nothing to direct the traffic to our site.

“Social media is free, it’s 24/7, it’s accessible for everyone,” he explained.

“We don’t need to do anything more than post and there it is. There’s already an audience out there, we don’t have to go out and find them. All we need to do is some retweets, some likes and shares and it moves itself.”

The 28-year-old has mainly used Twitter to grow RowZ’s online presence, but has also found the platform useful for recruiting new writers and illustrators.

“If I see someone write something for another publication that I really like then I’ll contact them,” explained Collins.

“But personally I get a lot of contacts from LinkedIn. I had a scouting series last year and I must have been talking to 40 or 50 scouts from across the world about different strategies and different processes that they go through. So there’s people from across the football community that you can get in touch with."

While long-form written articles, such as RowZ’s, are still well viewed online, social media means it is no longer a necessity when reporting the latest football news.

"Sometimes football fans want to hear something that they have a conversation with their mates about."

Many online sites, such as 90min, utilise the instantaneous nature of social media (Twitter in particular) to interact with their audience.

“When people are watching football, they’re always second-screening,” said Daniel Barr, the company’s Head of Social Media.

“So people will watch football on TV and they’ll have their phone in their hand scrolling through Twitter at the same time.

“We want to offer them something more, offer them a broader experience of the football match, entertain them, inform them, show them something they don’t know, give them some information they can tell their mates down the pub.”

Barr believes many football fans prefer shorter, bitesize information.

“Sometimes you look at big football accounts and think they’re trying to push very detailed, analytical, insightful views through top journalists. Sometimes football fans can look at it and think ‘I agree with it but I don’t want to read this 5,000-word essay on why Tottenham will finish third’. They want to hear something that they have a conversation with their mates about.

“Let’s say we have an article: ‘the top 10 English players of the last generation’. Obviously we can just post that on Facebook and Twitter and just say ‘read here’.

“On Twitter however, we can relay that in a different thread. We can go: ‘number 10: Sol Campbell, this is the reason, number nine: David Beckham, eight: Steven Gerrard….’

“You can give them what’s suitable on those platforms but then you can also say ‘If you want to read more then go through to our article here’.”

Threads are one of the many examples of how online platforms engage and interact with their audience on social media. Many sites will now use memes, GIFs, polls, or simply post an image and caption to engross their fans and create discussions about football.

The most rapidly developing content used by social media platforms, however, is video. While a picture may tell a thousand words, technological advancements mean video can now tell a million.

“I think that people are generally quite lazy,” jokes Daniel Rolinson, founder of the Villa View.

"If someone posts a blog about why Alan Hutton is a good full-back and it takes me three minutes to read it, or if someone does a video and it’s 10 minutes long, I personally - even though it takes more time - would be inclined to watch the video because it’s easy.

“I don’t have to use my brain like you do with reading, I can just sit there, put earphones in and it goes in while I’m doing something else.

“Video is obviously visually appealing as well, whereas written stuff is only ever going to be a block of text. You can change up video a little bit more. The content can be the same - you can make a video recording a written blog post, but because you put pictures or match footage you can enhance the same piece through video.”

The popularity and growth of video content has allowed YouTube to flourish in recent years and, according to Rolinson, it is the only platform he could imagine for The Villa View.

“Most people will probably be able to relate to the fact it’s midnight and you’re still watching YouTube videos and you’re miles away from the subject you started on, when you were watching a sneezing panda video or videos of dogs running round,” he said.

"Kids today want to be a ‘YouTuber’ and a ‘YouTuber’ is a job title now. YouTube has this whole community side to it as well, it’s such a big platform - everyone’s got a YouTube account.”

Companies such as Tifo Football, Copa90 and Hashtag United have latched onto this craze and now produce a range of YouTube content aimed at a younger audience.

Other social media platforms are also starting to realise the benefits of videos, with Facebook promoting their ‘Live’ feature and the recent algorithm changes which prioritise video content.

“Facebook seems to prefer pushing videos on people’s timelines rather than photos or links,” said Barr.

“It doesn’t like when you’re taking people away from Facebook. So they’re unlikely to put that on the top of someone’s newsfeed.

“In Facebook videos, if it’s not catchy within three seconds and it doesn’t have subtitles, it’s not going to work because I think about 80 percent of videos on Facebook aren’t watched with sound,” he explained.

Instagram has also benefited from the boom in video content through their introduction of Instagram TV and the Stories feature, the latter of which is widely acknowledged to have resulted in a decline in Snapchat’s popularity.

Online platform, Beyond the Pitch, also use Periscope, a live video-streaming service, to share its content.

“So, typically a Periscope consists of me talking about relevant topics at that moment and taking questions from live listeners,” said Phil Brown, the company’s founder.

“In this business, if you want to make money you have to have a video presence because most investors want a visual sell on their product,” he added.

However, one social media platform that does not naturally conform to video is Twitter, which, along with Reddit, has found something of a niche in football by offering interactions between a range of parties.

It will be of interest, over the coming years, to see whether Twitter gravitates towards video content, or continues to excel as a text-first platform.

The interviewees generally believed that video content will continue increasing its influence on social media, but held mixed views on what the future holds for the individual platforms.

Yet one commonalty among all online resources is that they will certainly be forced to adapt to the latest social media trends in order to continue engaging their audiences.

Clubs, players, fans, and traditional and online media forms have adjusted to Facebook algorithms, increased Twitter character allowances and Instagram TV in the past 12 months, and undoubtedly will face more fresh challenges in the immediate future.

This is the last in a five-part series exploring social media’s use in football. Click here to start the series from the beginning