Continental Cup Kick-Off: Social Media Analysis of Two Exciting Games

This past weekend saw the kick-off of the Continental Cup featuring FA Women’s Super League and FA Women’s Championship teams. This gameweek included a game between FAWC’s top-ranked Durham and Aston Villa as well as an upset from Sheffield United over Liverpool (FAWSL). We used the Zoomph Platform to track the social conversation around the events, pulling in mentions, posts, phrases and hashtags from Twitter.

Feed Summary

Durham vs Aston Villa:

In just a little more than a day, the feed collected 135 organic posts, generating 2.6 million impressions and a total activity of 1.2k.
Liverpool vs Sheffield United:

Sheffield’s upset over favorite Liverpool outperformed the game in Durham on Twitter. With just 190 organic posts, the feed generated 9.3M impressions and 9.4k in engagements. The feed had over 500 people directly engaged in the conversation and reached over 1.8k profiles per post..

Throughout the morning and early afternoon, we saw both feeds being the most active during the game, but the Liverpool-Sheffield feed also saw a spike in audience involvement shortly after the game as many women’s football fans shared their thoughts on the upset.

Hashtags

#ContiCup was the most mentioned hashtag in both feeds followed by several game and team-specific hashtags.

Around the Durham-Aston Villa game, the most mentioned hashtags were #AVFC, #SeeUsRoar, and #DURvAST. The first two hashtags are team-specific, used by and for Aston Villa (@AVWFCOfficial), while the hashtag #DURvAST was specifically for this game. #DURvAST was mainly used by Durham’s official Twitter account (@DurhamWFC).

Around the Liverpool-Sheffield United game, the most mentioned hashtags were #LFCWomen, #SUFCW, and #LFCW. All three hashtags are team specific. While Liverpool’s #LFCWomen and #LFCW received the most attention before and during the game, Sheffield’s #SUFCW outperformed Liverpool’s hashtags after the game with mentions up to late Sunday night.

Top Tweets

The most engaging content in the Liverpool-Sheffield feed, as ranked by ZPoints (see meaning below), came from Liverpool official Twitter account (@LiverpoolFCW) with a post mentioning Niamh Charles’ (@niamhcharles7) goal to put Liverpool back ahead (2–1) in the 62nd minute of the game.

From Sheffield’s side (@sufc_women), the game-winning goal in the 94th minute by Jade Pennock (@JadePennock) received the highest amount of ZPoints with over 400 likes. Jade Pennock was also the most mentioned player in the game’s feed.

The most engaging content in the Durham-Aston Villa feed, as ranked by ZPoints, came from Durham’s official Twitter account as they shared the final score of the game. Sophie Haywood’s (@SophieKHaywood) interesting phone story caught a lot of attention before and after the game. The story made her and Aston Villa Head Coach Gemma Davies (@gemdav6) rank among the most mentioned accounts in this feed. Durham’s goalscorer Molly Sharpe (@mollysharpe_) followed them as one of the most mentioned accounts. Out of the players tweeting about this game, Rebecca Salicki’s (@Salicki14) tweet received the most ZPoints.

“ZPoints” is a context-sensitive measurement of social influence that determines influence based on the units of attention a social media topic is generating. This can be a combination of likes, retweets, shares, comments, etc. The higher the ZPoints, the more influence a post had.

We used the Zoomph Platform for our social media analysis. Zoomph is an End-to-end Platform for Social Audience Intelligence and Sponsorship Measurement and Evaluation. More information can be found on https://zoomph.com. More information available on request.