By Paul Nicholson
April 27 – They may lag behind rivals Arsenal and Chelsea in the Twitter follower rankings if you just take into account their English language twitter feeds, but Man Utd are top of the world when it comes to total number of Twitter followers when adding in all language accounts held by clubs.
With 6.58 million followers in total, Man Utd are more than 700,000 ahead of Chelsea. This contrasts to UK numbers where Man Utd have 4.9 million followers are adrift of Arsenal’s 5.7 million and Chelsea’s 5.5 million.
Impressively, Liverpool have official twitter accounts in 23 different languages, Manchester City in 12 languages with Man Utd and Spurs in six languages each. By contrast, Arsenal and Chelsea only version into three and four languages and combined, neither club breaks 50,000 followers with their foreign language feeds.
An interactive twitter heat map released last week, showed Liverpool as the dominant club by geographical area in the UK. However, when it comes to numbers in the English language total followers chart, Liverpool come in fourth in at 4.2 million followers.
The difference between the heat map and the actual numbers is that the heat map only looks at comparative concentration of followers as opposed to actual numbers of followers, so a large rural areas, such as Ripon, with fewer followers generally per sq km shows as a red hot area of Liverpool followers.
The heat map only measures English language twitter feeds, but if the foreign language feeds of the clubs are separated from the English language feeds, Liverpool would be third in the Premier League table globally, behind Man Utd and Man City (who have almost 1 million followers in the Middle East).
The heat maps shows that Man Utd for example, is spread more dominantly across the world whilst Liverpool supporters are more dominant in Europe. The spread for Arsenal and Chelsea is roughly even. However, out of all the clubs Man City show the strongest reach across different parts of the world.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1734955030labto1734955030ofdlr1734955030owedi1734955030sni@n1734955030osloh1734955030cin.l1734955030uap1734955030