Liverpool FC On Global Digital Growth
Paul Rogers, Head of International Digital Development, at Liverpool FC speaks to #CuttingEdgeSport about the recent global expansion of the club’s online presence.
We are experiencing different social platforms all the time now, facebook and twitter have always grabbed the headlines of late, but we are now seeing a segmentation of social platforms such as vine, and Instagram. Twitter is also now launching a new video platform so we’re now moving into a new phase where one-size no longer fits all. We are starting to see different audiences with different platforms.
There’s a growing younger audience of fans on Instagram, rather than Facebook or twitter as they used to be, so the content we deliver is different across platforms.
I remember when Liverpool won champs league in 2005, we didn’t have YouTube, twitter or Facebook, and that’s only nine years ago – so if anyone can predict what will happen nine years from now they will be a millionaire in a decade!
In terms of digital strategy one-size-fits-all simply doesn’t work anymore. We’re delivering content in English when three quarters of the world doesn’t speak the language. So how can we deliver content where language isn’t a barrier – and how do we deliver content where language might not be a barrier but relevance is? Those are the questions we needed to ask ourselves.
What we looked at doing is not translating content, but localising content. So if we are delivering content in Thailand we would not do what we would for an English audience, and then turn it to Thai, it wouldn’t work. Many football clubs have launched local language websites that haven’t taken off, our approach has been about localisation every step of the way rather than taking content designed for fans living 3 miles from the ground and delivering it to fans 3,000 miles away.
South Africa is an example of an increasingly important overseas market. It will drive the 7th highest amount of traffic to our website, the 6th highest amount to page impressions – 171,000 fans from SA – 3.3M page impressions. On Facebook we have over 200,000 followers from SA – it’s a key market.
Liverpool is fortunate for the loyal fan base all over the world. It’s been 20 years since we last played in South Africa but they still follow our every move, and we can’t take that for granted. We need to visit the fans – it’s great to have the social and digital following but we need to bring the players over! We are working on that in the near future.
