FAWSL Week 3 Recap: Breast Cancer Awareness, Historic Game in London Stadium, and Manchester United Wins On and Off The Field

Week 3 of the FA Women’s Super League saw two rivalries that gained a lot of social media attention over the weekend. Manchester United faced Liverpool at home on Saturday afternoon while West Ham United played their first game in London Stadium against Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday. Heading into October, West Ham United launched its Breast Cancer Awareness campaign which received great feedback and support. We used the Zoomph Platform to track the social conversation around the events, pulling in mentions, posts, phrases and hashtags from twitter.

In order to compare the social media attention around the games, the time range taken for each game is from two days before kick-off until two days after the final whistle.

Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign

On Friday, West Ham United (@westhamwomen) launched its Breast Cancer Awareness campaign for the month of October. In support of Breast Cancer Now (@BreastCancerNow), they will be wearing a limited-edition pink shirt throughout their fixtures in October. All proceeds from the sale of this third kit will be donated to Breast Cancer Now. The limited-edition kit is on sale in-store and online.

The launch of this campaign made Breast Cancer Now the most talked about brand in the West Ham United-Tottenham Hotspur feed as it was mentioned 580 times.

West Ham United vs Tottenham Hotspur

Landmark day for West Ham United

History was made in East London on Sunday as West Ham United played their first-ever game in London Stadium against rival Tottenham Hotspur. Although the irons did not get the result they had hoped for, they had the second largest FAWSL crowd, according to @FIFAWWC, with 24,790 fans in attendance.

To celebrate this historic day with the fans, West Ham United gave away a signed Katharina Baunach shirt. The announcement of this giveaway became the top tweet in this game’s feed, as ranked by ZPoints (see meaning below), as fans shared this post for a chance to win. From Tottenham Hotspur’s side (@SpursWomen), their post sharing the full-time score with goals from Rianna Dean and Lucy Quinn received the highest amount of ZPoints with over 1.2k in likes and retweets.

Feed Summary

Over the course of 5 days, including gameday, the feed collected 664 organic posts and reached over 12 million unique profiles. With a total activity of over 32k and over 3k people directly involved in the conversation, the feed generated close to 40 million in impressions.

Hashtags

Most hashtags used in this feed were team-specific. Tottenham Hotspur’s hashtags #COYS and #THWFC were the most mentioned hashtags on gameday, outperforming West Ham United’s hashtag #COYI. #COYS reached close to 4 million unique profiles and generated over 9k in social impressions per post (on average).

Leading up to the game, the hashtag #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth was the most mentioned in the feed due to the launch of West Ham United’s campaign mentioned above. #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth also saw a spike in attention two days after the game. The hashtag generated over 10k in social impressions per post (on average).

Audience Analysis

The demographic information generated by Zoomph (derived from social media and data sets integrated into Zoomph) shows that 69.3% and 55.4% of the audience members involved in this feed were males and millennials, respectively. 81% of the tweets came from the United Kingdom, the top location of this feed.

Manchester United vs Liverpool

Feed Summary

Manchester United and Liverpool kicked off the third week of FAWSL football on Saturday afternoon. The feed outperformed any other FAWSL feed from the weekend with close to 49 million impressions and an audience reach of 21 million (unique profiles). The game had over three thousand people directly involved in the conversation. Although there was some negativity around the event, especially after the game, over 95% of the tweets contained positive or objective content.

Hashtags

The feed peaked on gameday as over 6k posts were coming in, almost 4k more than the West Ham United-Tottenham Hotspur feed on Sunday. Especially Manchester United’s (@ManUtdWomen) hashtag #MUWomen moved the conversation. Over 4.4k posts included the #MUWomen hashtag and this engaged over 2.2k people in the conversation. Liverpool’s (@LiverpoolFCW) #LFCWomen hashtag saw a lot less attention but reached over 13 million people with just 383 posts. The posts containing #LFCWomen were also very effective with 44.9k social impressions per posts (on average) compared to the #MUWomen posts with only 2.5k social impressions per post (on average).

Top Tweets

The most engaging content in the Manchester United-Liverpool feed, as ranked by ZPoints (see meaning below), came from Manchester United’s official twitter account as they shared the final score of the game (137 ZPoints). This tweet saw over 9.3k in total activity and more than 100k unique profiles were exposed to the content. The official twitter account of the FAWSL (@BarclaysFAWSL) shared the game’s first goal scored by Lauren James, which received the second-most attention in this feed with 117 ZPoints.

Top Influencers

Not surprisingly, the official twitter accounts of Manchester United, the FAWSL, and Liverpool were the top influencers in this feed. Lauren James (@laurenjamess22) followed the top three and was the most influential player. Her tweet after the game generated over 2.7k in total activity and 46.4k in impressions. Lauren James was also the most mentioned player in the feed as she was mentioned in 39% (3,428 posts) of the tweets. Second goal scorer Katie Zelem (@katiezel) was the next most mentioned player in this feed as 26% of the tweets mentioned her.

“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. [Zoomph. (2018, February 9). What are ZPoints™? Retrieved from https://zoomph.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/208279186-What-are-ZPoints-]

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.