We’re about three months into the MLS season – time for another edition of the highly in-official Hype-O-Meter. With two important changes:
- How “real” are your followers: When Atlanta United entered the scene, there was much debate on
whetherhow much they had bought themselves into their “from-hero-to-zero” status on Twitter. An expansion team suddenly having the most followers in the league – smells like fake. And it seems to be exactly that. Inspired by the press coverage of Trump’s Twitter exploits, I used “Twitter Audit” to analyze a sample of Twitter followers for each team. Although this is not a perfect representation for the exact makeup of each team’s followers (e.g., I did not pay for a pro account and therefore had to rely on data from earlier analyses, only sub-samples were analyzed), it can serve as a decent proxy.
“Each audit takes a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.”
What I found was quite interesting. As some commentators had suspected earlier: Atlanta seems to have added quite a bit their follower count. In fact: Only 48% of their 517,134 followers are deemed real. Interestingly, though, that does not seem to hurt them. Usually, simple bots or fake accounts won’t buy you any fan engagement (as measured in likes and retweets), but Atlanta still comes in a solid 3rd. However, they are the exception. There are several other teams in the MLS that seem to have added to their follower count — and as a result, find themselves mostly towards the bottom of the engagement chart.
Here is the complete list of “fakeness” in the MLS:
| Team | Followers | % of “Real” Followers |
| Vancouver | 308005 | 26 |
| Toronto | 290872 | 42 |
| Atlanta | 517134 | 48 |
| Houston | 343049 | 51 |
| Montral | 284534 | 61 |
| Orlando | 387925 | 63 |
| San Jose | 203446 | 63 |
| Washington | 117203 | 64 |
| Seattle | 407927 | 66 |
| Portland | 285669 | 73 |
| Los Angeles | 391280 | 74 |
| NY Red Bulls | 184798 | 76 |
| Dallas | 134959 | 77 |
| Colorado | 84481 | 77 |
| Kansas City | 297709 | 78 |
| Chicago | 139334 | 80 |
| Philadelphia | 109161 | 81 |
| NYCFC | 332828 | 83 |
| New England | 89855 | 84 |
| Columbus | 143143 | 85 |
| Salt Lake | 127778 | 87 |
| Minnesota | 60619 | 88 |
No surprise: all professional / celebrity accounts will draw some noise and attract the occasional bot follower. However, the result for Vancouver was quite shocking. Of their more than 300k followers, only 26% (or about 80k) are active enough to be counted as “real”. I almost hope that this is some form of a slip-up, but the engagement numbers would match the trend. For the 2nd time in a row, the Whitecaps are among the bottom three of the league, generating only .86 favorites and .6 retweets per 10000 followers. They were also voted as least appealing Twitter Account by Howler Magazine. Houston and Montreal, the only two teams with less fan engagement, also rank in the first quarter of the “fake followers” analysis. On the other side of the spectrum: Minnesota United deserves a big shout out. The expansion franchise seemingly chose the slow(er) route of organic growth on social media and now tops the Engagement Ranking for the 2nd time in a row — with a whopping margin.
2. Bye, bye – Facebook. I decided to leave Facebook out of the analysis. Both platforms are very different and lumping them together in one analysis is likely to confound the results. Instead, I decided to focus on Twitter — which became even richer from a data perspective given the addition of “Twitter Audit” and some planned further analyses.
Some interesting findings / thoughts.
- Overall engagement and tweet frequency are up from the pre-season analysis. Which makes perfect sense given that game days are expected to a) see more tweets, and b) get fans much more involved.
- Chicago Fire and L.A. Galaxy upped their game. Not sure if it is the “Schweinsteiger-Effekt” for Chicago or getting quite a bit of TV time for Los Angeles, but both teams jump significantly in the ranking. They might have also simply upped their social media efforts for the season: L.A. was just voted as having the best memes in the MLS.
- Can’t buy me love – or can I? Atlanta is somewhat of a conundrum. I just complained about their (presumably) artificially bolstered follower count and how that should diminish their fan engagement scores, and yet they rank among the top three for the 2nd time in a row. How can that be? We can’t be sure, but there are some possible explanations:
- 1) Even without the suspected bots, United would still sport almost 250k followers – the 4th most in the MLS (when all teams are adjusted to their true follower count based on Twitter Audit data). So: There is quite some buzz surrounding the team — and maybe making the follower count look nice early on kick-started overall engagement. When we only look at this “core” group of followers and calculate engagement based on them, Atlanta comes in first. By far.
- 2) I don’t want to suggest anything here – I really like how Atlanta has kick-started their campaign on the pitch as well as online – but one could also suspect that they invested in smart bots that could automatically like and share content instead of “dead” fake accounts. In the end, though, any brand engaging in such behavior would shoot itself in the foot. No matter how well a bot is programmed, unless you also train in to buy your merchandise and sit in the stands, the ROI simply won’t be there. Instead, you’ll have to explain why you seem to have a gazillion fans — that never buy anything.
- Love thy fans! There is quite a variance in the amount of interactivity among teams and their fans – at least when taking replies (and retweets) on Twitter as a proxy. Seattle leads the reply charts: more than 28% of all original tweets were in reply to another Twitter account — compared to 4% for Orlando and Montreal. Looking at retweets, Salt Lake is king. Almost 39% of all tweets are re-tweets. On the other end of the spectrum: Philadelphia posts the most original content with “only” 9% of RTs.
Jan Boehmer, Ph.D. 