Hashtag City: Even after relegation Leicester City are still prioritising likes over loyalty
As Enzo Maresca goes about changing the mentality of the playing staff, Jamie Barnard reckons it’s time for a change in the marketing department too.
Did you hear that one about the time Everton’s official Twitter account updated their millions of followers that they’d had: “The best day out with the best sis in world”? That best day must have turned swiftly into a pretty bad one for the person behind the keyboard with them mixing up professional and private accounts - assuming that the football club hadn’t actually been for a lovely day out with Tranmere FC, that is.
Or perhaps you remember the time Sunderland striker Victor Anichebe, beleaguered by poor form, managed to Tweet word-for-word what his social media manager had sent to him. It read: “Can you Tweet something like: Unbelievable support yesterday and great effort by the lads! Hard result to take! But we go again!”. The copy and paste mishap encapsulated the care and attention to detail he’d shown on the pitch that season. It was a lazy, sloppy and easily avoidable mistake had he displayed even just an ounce of nous.
The world of football social media. It really is a jungle out there.
In many ways, it has become the de facto way for football clubs to communicate with their target market (aka ‘fans’) and Leicester City are no different. Money dictates that it must be this way. Whereas previously, sponsors would happily pay for the brand visibility of front-of-shirt logos, in an era where data, clicks and views is everything, they want to measure the number of eyeballs on anything they pay for and this is not possible with a shirt logo.
It’s the reason why many clubs secure good sponsors for their website and media channels but fail to sell their front of shirt sponsorship or end up with, at best, no-mark betting brands or, at worst, murky and obscure firms that are likely just a backdoor route for owner investment or financial doping. Take a look at the website for FBS and tell me if it looks like a company that should have the resources for a sizeable sponsorship.
But if the priority has become online engagement, at what cost?
Building the global #brand
Leicester’s success in the social media era has led to a sizeable online following that would fill the King Power Stadium 86.5 times over: a total of 2.7 million Twitter followers, to be exact. It dwarfs any other social following in The Championship but it also creates an interesting paradox of a club that is not only communicating to the local community it has always spoken to, but now also every corner of the globe. Speaking to both at the same time, via the same medium.
Those two audiences can often feel at odds with each other and the club can often feel partly something but nothing completely.
It’s a club that, on one hand, will participate in an Asian pre-season tournament to build that brand and aim to compete with the giants of the Premier League. On the other, it will have a former academy coach running the whole football operation. A club that won’t put tickets on general sale to locals so as to force their hand into buying memberships to stand any chance of getting through the turnstiles, but who will still roll out the Birch before kick-off for him to shout: “This is your club, your city. You can and do make a difference”.
Being the person paid to craft messaging to the club’s audience can’t be the easiest job. One minute you’re in the middle of your three-year degree learning about algorithms, hashtags and ‘brand voice’, the next you’ve got a direct line to thousands of passionate and knowledgable ‘customers’ at your fingertips (note to self: must not use the word ‘customers’, even though everyone else internally treats them like that - #confusing).
The thing with football fans is that they know more about your ‘product’ than you. They’ve consumed it since birth, dedicated hours of their lives to it, they read about it, speak to their friends and family about it, get it tattooed on their body, name their children and pets after it, organise their holidays around it, hate it and love it at the same time.
You, as the social media team, Googled it for the job interview.
Good luck, Madders!
Maybe I’m more sensitive to it in times like these - where I see so many things about the club that are unforgivably broken or ineffective - but there’s a lot around social media and the club that I don’t like right now.
Picture the scene. It’s a warm summer’s evening and I’m scrolling away on my phone. Ah, here’s some quotes from Timothy Castagne on international duty with Belgium, what’s old Timothy got to say for himself? Old Timmy, old chum?! Maybe it’s an apology for his part in the relegation…
Oh, he’s telling us that he’s staying relaxed whilst his agent works on finding him a ‘top club’. Good for him! Meanwhile, the club’s official Twitter channel is excitedly telling me that ‘our Belgian duo’ are in action and providing a proud blow-by-blow update of how they’re getting on. Jeez.
They’re not the only ‘International Foxes’ on duty though. Captain Not So Fantastic, Jonny Evans, is playing for Northern Ireland. He’s out of contract in 11 days and hasn’t quite got round to telling the club if he’s in or out for next season yet but I’m sure the fans are dying to know how he’s getting on with international duty. Jeez.
Fast-forward a few days and James Maddison has gone to Spurs. That’s not surprising, and actually quite amusing that he’s played his way into a move like that, rather than the one his ego likely told him to expect. But now, here’s a heartfelt tribute from Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall on Instagram, gushing over his friend (who he’s been plastering his private jet luxury holiday to Ibiza with all over my feed in recent days) and telling him that he ‘deserves this’.
That’s right, the guy who has been at the club since 8 years old and is often touted as a future captain is telling a guy publicly, who was nowhere to be seen as we slumped out of the Premier League, that he deserves this transfer. Not a message delivered privately, something that little Kiernan just had to profess publicly. Jeez.
And then, here comes the club’s official Twitter account with a cute little montage video titled: “Thanks Madders”. Thanks?! Thank you?! For what, exactly?! I’m incredulous now: bar Jamie Vardy, there’s not a single player in the squad that deserves a thank you after inflicting the damage that they did on the club last season. Jeez.
Time passes. I’m a few days deep into the videos of the players back in pre-season training. There’s nothing like repeatedly seeing professional footballers smack balls into empty 3ft x 2ft mini goals to get the optimism juices flowing, is there? I’m utterly convinced now that if The Championship becomes a ‘Honey I Shrunk The Goals’ movie, we’ve got this thing sewn up. Albrighton’s back on scene with Vardy. Ricardo’s looking in such great shape that his September rehab should be a doddle. Maresca’s another 50 ‘well dahn’s away from ringing a little bell. All is good with the world.
What might the social media admin decide to show us next you might ask? Who are we focusing on in today’s photos? Maybe someone we’ll look at and think: “Y’know what? It’s not a bad thing he’s still around. He might be alright in The Championship y’know”?
‘Returning Wardy’. Oh, it’s a photo of Danny Ward with a perfection hand gesture emoji. A man who, if he’d been forced to play every game last season whilst doing the ‘perfect’ hand gesture with both hands, would likely have got more fingers on shots than he actually managed as he played a major role in our demise. Jeez.
Read the room, guys.
Know your audience
I know there are more important things to care about and to address. I’m glad some of them are being done. The signings of Harry Winks and Conor Coady are signs of an effort to bring some mentality into the squad that was severely lacking last year. The appointment of Maresca is fresh and he’s already talking the club up, not down.
But on the ‘to-do’ list - alongside shifting the likes of Soumare, Vestergaard and Praet, Rudkin resigning and the club publishing the findings of the supposed ‘internal review’ into what went wrong - should be repairing the disconnect between club and fans.
The recent release of the match day pricing didn’t exactly inspire confidence that anyone in the club ‘gets it’. We are a club that’s now asking people to stump up nearly £50 to watch Championship football during a cost of living crisis. And the social media team could clearly hit the mark a little better than they have done with recent ‘engagement’ attempts.
Because ultimately, when it’s Preston North End at home on that Wednesday night in early October, it’ll be the 27,000 people walking through the turnstile rather than the 2.7 million on social media that the club will need to rely on. I’m not sure that penny has dropped quite yet, and that tempers my ‘best day out with the best manager in the world’ Maresca-driven optimism for now.
Write something like ‘Keep The Faith’.
