By Paul Nicholson
April 2 – In the week to March 27, Manchester United more than doubled their average weekly gain in Twitter followers over closest rivals Arsenal and Chelsea.
Having topped the Insideworldfootball weekly new followers table for a straight six weeks, week six was a bumper one for the club that saw it put on more than 60,000 new followers, a weekly record and more than 20,000 than second placed Arsenal. The weekly gap has averaged 10,000.
Arsenal still top the total followers table, by 850,000 followers, but third-placed Man Utd are relentlessly reeling them in.
Liverpool leapfrogged Chelsea to take third spot in the weekly chart and pushed Arsenal for second place. Both clubs were more than 4,000 new followers ahead of Chelsea.
Manchester City in fifth were double the new followers of sixth placed Spurs, but almost 24,000+ new followers behind Chelsea and a massive 50,000 behind Manchester Utd, a gulf that just seems to widen.
The six week trend chart shows the dominance of the Big 5 clubs and is a perfect illustration of how the top performers just get better each week leaving the other clubs struggling and falling further behind.
Looking at the growth of new followers each week as a percentage of previous week total followers, shows just how hard the other clubs are really working and performing. Burnley, at the bottom of the league of total followers have highest growth percentage. Man Utd are unique in being third in total followers and chasing third in terms of percentage growth.
Over the six-week period, Burnley have consistently had greatest percentage with Leicester in seconf place and Hull in third place.
When it comes to looking at the six-week trend for number of tweets made, the chart shows that clubs are in more control of their activity than they are of their growth in followers. The slope of the bar chart shows a steady increase in the number of tweets across the last six weeks for every club in the Premier League.
This week West Ham shot up from fifth to top place and have tweeted the most over the last 6 weeks with Everton in second place and Tottenham third.
Man Utd show the greatest percentage growth in new tweets but to put this into real terms of total tweets they are still lagging behind all the other clubs. It is remarkable that despite this they have amassed so many followers and are currently dominating so emphatically on a weekly basis. It would be interesting to see if they decided not to tweet one week whether they would still top the followers growth chart for that week.
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