What Berwick Rangers going viral tells football clubs about social media

It’s 4.50pm on a cold, blustery Saturday in March and I am at the in-laws’ house on the south coast of England. Cups of tea have been distributed, rugby is on the TV and Scotland are trundling to another defeat. Amid sympathetic murmurings, I glance at Twitter for the score that matters. Dumbarton have beaten Montrose away and my mood is saved for the evening.

My attention, however, is drawn to the multitude of likes and shares appearing on a tweet from the official Berwick Rangers account: “Ugly scenes in the dugout as Cowdenbeath’s manager has just told [Berwick manager] Johnny Harvey to ‘take his face for a sh*te’ #BRFC.”

As I stifle a giggle, I realise two things: firstly, I probably can’t explain what’s so funny to present company and, secondly, Berwick Rangers are going viral. Fast forward a week and, according to the Daily Record, the tweet had caused a “social media storm” that had “captured the attention of the nation”. With more than 8,000 retweets and 22,000 likes, the tweet certainly outperformed the average numbers for Scottish Premiership clubs, let alone one in the fourth tier.

Berwick Rangers were receiving more media attention than at any time since they secured results against the other Rangers in 2012 and 1967. However, as far as the club’s directors were concerned, the attention was entirely undesirable. By the time of their next fixture, four days later, they had deleted the tweet and relieved their voluntary, unpaid social media administrator of his duties. Amid the various claims and counter-claims about his dismissal, the sacked volunteer spoke of a “generational gap” and the club’s failure to understand “the power of social media”.

Upon hearing this, I envisioned a bevy of befuddled blazers trying to find the delete button on “the Twitter” through the haze of a smoke-filled back room at Shielfield Park. In an age where social media can take a reality TV star to the White House and turn hashtags into global movements, its potency is surely self-evident. But what does the “power of social media” mean in the context of football and why should online attention matter to Berwick Rangers – or any club?

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Over the past decade the world’s consumption of media has changed fundamentally. Time spent on digital mobile devices has increased from 19 to 171 minutes every day, with time on social media up to 136 minutes a day. This attention shift from TV, radio and newspapers to mobile devices and social media has been particularly dramatic among teens and millennials, who spend up to 10% more time on mobile and social media, and up to 75% less time watching TV than other age groups. A generational gap, if you will. Put simply, we now spend more time on social media than we do eating, drinking, socialising or going to the football.

This fundamental shift applies particularly to football. Football content is increasingly consumed by young people through Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat rather than on TV or in the stadium. While viewing figures for live Premier League games on Sky hit a seven-year low in the 2016-17 season, overall sports media consumption grew by 13% because of content viewed online.

Once online, the modern fan is driven by the immediacy of content that can be accessed quickly from a variety of sources: from other fans to online publishers and players themselves, rather than loyalty to any club, league or country. To give one example, Juventus gained six million social media followers after signing Cristiano Ronaldo, while Real Madrid lost one million.

This poses a challenge to clubs in big leagues whose finances have been underpinned for the past 25 years by the willingness of TV companies to pay huge sums for live broadcast rights. If younger fans aren’t subscribing to those channels, why should broadcasters continue to pay so much for the rights?

More broadly, it asks a question of any football club seeking to retain fans or find new ones. If the fans are not in the stadium, in front of the TV or reading newspapers, how do clubs reach them? And if clubs can’t reach fans, how will they survive in football’s digitally disrupted economy?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first clubs to address this challenge off the pitch was also one of the most successful on it: Real Madrid. In announcing a “digital transformation partnership” with Microsoft in 2015, managing director José Ángel Sánchez said: “Seventy years ago, when the soccer economy was based on ticket sales, the president of Real Madrid built a huge stadium to house 120,000 people. He thought that having the biggest stadium would provide the biggest revenues so he would be able to acquire rights to biggest players in the world. That’s exactly what Santiago Bernabéu did. Now we have over 450 million fans so we have to build the virtual stadium to put them all in and understand what they are expecting from us so the club can benefit from what they want.”

Fans have changed, so clubs are doing likewise. As Stephen Bourke, an expert in digital transformation in sport, puts it: “Fans are now connected consumers and, for their passion, they expect even more personalisation and relevance from the team than they do from leading brands … This is achieved through content, which gives fans an all-access pass to the team and its personalities, creates excitement and interaction leading up to the next match, enhance the matchday experience, and then dissect the event – and on it goes.”

Clubs are trying to create a virtuous cycle of revenue and appreciation that looks like this: “Creating engaging content builds followership, followership builds digital assets, digital assets unlock new partner revenues, new revenues and partners enable more engaging content.”

If this all sounds a bit abstract, a number of clubs are putting the theory into practice. When Roma hired Paul Rogers from Liverpool as head of digital in 2015, his first step was to revamp the club’s online presence based on feedback and ideas from supporters. Roma’s website now acts as a digital platform that curates fan content and ideas, while their social media channels mix playful and serious content with the overarching aim of becoming “the most digitally connected sports team in the world”.

Rogers recognises his method may not please everyone “but we believe the approach we’ve taken gives us a better chance of success and is more likely to come closer to satisfying the ever-increasing demands of our existing and future global fanbase”. Two years after he arrived, Roma were the second-fastest growing club on social media globally with a 32% increase in followers across all platforms.

Benjamin Stoll, the former head of digital strategy at Bayern Munich, says his job was all about engaging fans: “Coming to the stadium is just one of the situations where we meet our fans. We need to be very sensitive with our identity as a football club and never forget where we come from, but we also need to respect and operate to meet the expectations of modern football fans who are influenced by technology every day.” By developing their club app, website and social media channels to meet fan expectations, Bayern also benefitted financially. Last May the club launched the FCB Digital & Media Lab, a multimedia subsidiary equipped with 60 staff to sell data and media-related services to third parties, such as sponsors and even other clubs.

Of course, Roma and Bayern already have huge fanbases and the ability to commercialise their content through sponsors, partners and merchandise. But what about smaller clubs? Could Bourke’s virtuous cycle – from producing engaging content to attracting fans to making money – apply to smaller clubs? “Any club that makes money from sponsorship is big enough to adopt a social business approach,” says Bourke. “Most importantly, fans expect their team to service them with content – and so do sponsors. Access to digital and social platforms is equally available to all organisations regardless of size. In terms of content, fans favour authentic over slick production. Content is about being creative within a defined brand narrative rather than who has the biggest production budget.”

A number of Scottish clubs seem to be proving Stephen’s point. My own team, Dumbarton, record games at relatively low-cost, upload highlights to YouTube and seek sponsors for that footage. Further up the leagues, Dunfermline Athletic’s videos are sponsored by a local furniture company and St Mirren’s are sponsored by a facilities management outfit.

However, as Chris Samson of Sports Marketing Scotland remarks, many clubs still have a short-term focus on using “digital assets for the analogue purpose of driving revenue through the maximisation of facilities”, rather than creating new opportunities online. Chris says the problem is not necessarily one of resource, but one of priority: “Many clubs will spend money on signing a player for six months rather than putting that resource into marketing staff who could engage fans and increase revenues. If I look at Major League Soccer on the other hand, their big priority is retaining fans and identifying new ones through effective marketing.”

One club that has prioritised fan engagement online, however, is Motherwell. I had seen their parody of the Alexis Sánchez signing video featuring Peter Hartley on a piano and their rap video poking fun at Memphis Depay after he bragged of reaching five million followers on Instagram. What I hadn’t realised was the extent to which this was part of a wider strategy that very much reflects those of Roma and Bayern. Their communications manager, Grant Russell, says they aim to “be relatable to our fans and bring them closer to our club, while also trying to be appealing to others who want to get involved”.

They increased their followers by 28% last year but it’s not about technology for technology’s sake: “We don’t just pursue likes and retweets for hollow satisfaction. There’s a strategy to it where we are trying to push the brand, build a personality around our club and players, and tell their stories. We do that to try and make them and us more engaging to fans, and also to potential brand partners, so they’ve a clear idea of what they are getting involved in and if it ties into their story too. Social media opens up new opportunities for us to attract partners that typically wouldn’t be at the table. When we tell them our engagement-to-follower ratio on our top 10 videos each month is routinely three times bigger than any major club, or when we show them our access to players and willingness to try something different, then we become appealing.”

Russell says Motherwell aim to “look and feel like one of the world’s top clubs – it may be a bold claim but we have the talent and the capabilities to create the image of being exactly that”. It’s heartening to hear a Scottish club with so much ambition and faith in their ability. And they are not the only ones. When marketing agency Red Hot Penny compared social media accounts for sports clubs across the UK, they concluded that Celtic have the most engaged fans. Only Somerset cricket club performed better.

The power of social media for football clubs, therefore, is to meet their fans’ expectations: to reach, inform and entertain them. As Chris Samson says, it’s about “creating an identity, showcasing what the club is all about and, most importantly, having a bit of a laugh now and again”.

And if that identity is engaging enough, if you are able to create things fans want to see and share, new revenue opportunities will inevitably arise. If you want proof, just ask Berwick Rangers’ former social media admin. You’ll find him in his new, fully paid role writing about Scottish football. The virtuous cycle in action.