Klout

The social media Premier League table

Matt Briggs

Matt Briggs

— 2 min read

Last week I wrote a very short post about whether it mattered if Premier League football clubs were any good at using Twitter and I decided that it doesn’t. The basis for this conclusion was that the loyalty of your average football supporter trumps the need for new and interesting content. Hardly a ground breaking conclusion, however this realisation also made me think about how we could better discover who’s top of the social media league table.

Taking inspiration from Richard Bailey’s #socialstudent experiment I’ve used two analytical tools to study the social media footprint of the members of the English Premier League, adding the scores from both together and then halving that number to come up with the total. See where your club places below:


 Team Followers Klout Peer Index TOTAL
1 Chelsea 672,155 77 64 70.5
2 Manchester City 245,280 76 58 67
3 Liverpool 763,632 78 50 64
4 Arsenal 1,278,585 80 47 63.5
5 Tottenham Hotspur 147,264 69 58 63.5
6 Bolton Wanderers 17,096 59 62 60.5
7 Norwich City 28,722 66 53 59.5
8 Aston Villa 41,389 63 51 57
9 Fulham 35,203 64 48 56
10 Sunderland 37,246 66 46 56
11 Wolverhampton Wanderers 27,740 64 45 54.5
12 West Bromwich Albion 10,922 58 50 54
13 Everton 41,993 66 40 53
14 Newcastle United 50,158 61 43 52
15 Queens Park Rangers 23,887 60 40 50
16 Stoke City 21,738 55 33 44
17 Wigan Athletic 10,173 56 32 44
18 Blackburn Rovers 13,691 49 32 40.5

(N.B. You may have noticed that Manchester United and Swansea City don’t feature. There’s a good reason for this, mainly the lack of a Twitter account for the former and an incomplete set of metric data for the latter. Don’t worry though, should either situation change I’ll post an updated list as soon as possible!)

There are a couple of interesting points to come out of this exercise, the main one being that while followers are important they are not the be all and end all. Despite a gulf of over one million followers the combined Klout and PeerIndex scores of North London rivals Arsenal and Spurs are exactly the same. Further down the list there are examples of clubs with a smaller number of followers sneaking ahead of the more recognised names.

Unfortunately I don’t expect to see Chelsea fans dancing in the streets of south west London tonight on the back of this post, after all the reliability of metric data is still up for some debate. That said I still think there’s enough here to give those of us who use social media professionally some food for thought. It’s becoming apparent that there’s more to life than just followers.

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