It’s been a few months since Opta and MLS announced their partnership so I thought it would be a good time to take a look at how the partnership is doing. Opta is fantastic at leveraging Twitter so I thought examining the popularity of their different Twitter personas would be a good way to compare how much fans of different leagues engage with Opta.
Opta Joe, the persona that covers the EPL, is far and away the biggest Opta Twitter account. He has almost an order of magnitude more followers than his nearest compatriot, with 113,000 followers to Opta Jose’s 15,000 followers. I’ve left Opta Joe off of the charts so that the subtle differences between the remaining personas is more apparent.
Opta Jack, the persona covering MLS, is the newest Opta persona so he hasn’t had much time to build up a following. That said, he still sits near the middle of the pack in terms of followers. While this is a respectable number of followers compared to the other Opta accounts, given the culture of statistics in American sports, I expected Opta Jack to be more popular.
However, just looking at followers doesn’t tell the whole picture. Opta Joe has the advantage that the EPL is the most popular league whereas Opta Jack is at a severe disadvantage in that regard. If you use television revenue to estimate popularity, then you can see how far behind MLS is compared to other leagues. However, if you adjust for popularity and look at Followers per Million Dollars of Television Revenue, then Opta Jack is doing incredibly well; better even than Opta Joe! Do Americans like sports statistics more than other sports fans? Sure looks like it.
As usual, stats can be misleading – I use the service to follow DC United general stats and chalkboard stuff, and really like it – but refuse to follow “Jack” on twitter. I do appreciate occasional re-tweets from real people I follow though
I am loving Optajack’s tweets as an MLS fan.
Nice article. I do follow ‘Jack’ just for the record. You interpret your data to mean that Americans like stats more than other sports fans.
An alternate hypothesis: It is very possible that MLS fans like twitter more than other league fans. Similarly, I wonder how many of the
Sorry got cut off. I was going to ponder how many of the ‘Joe’ followers are actually American (rather than English).
I’m a huge fan of @OptaJack; I love the tone and the stats. I just wish we could extend its reach to American horse racing, which keeps its stats locked behind paywalls, but that’s another issue. As an MLS fan, I really look forward to the tweets. More stats=happiness.
Like Patrick above, I wonder what happens when you control for Twitter users.
This article (http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/geography/) says that at the end of 2009 more than half of all twitter users were from the US, with the Brazil and the UK far behind with 9 and 7 percent respectively.
France on the other hand accounts for less than one percent of twitter users, but OptaJean has more than 10,000 followers. C’est si bon!