Ignore Social Media at Your Peril – Even in Scotland

I’m in Scotland and have been learning about a funny but telling incident on social media involving a lowly Scottish football club.

It all started on a cold, blustery Saturday last March when the internet was set alight with the name of one football club: Berwick Rangers.

A tweet about the club had gone viral. “Ugly scenes in the dugout as Cowdenbeath’s manager has just told [Berwick manager] Johnny Harvey to ‘take his face for a sh*te’ #BRFC.”

This was put out on the official Berwick Rangers tweet.

A week later the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record told of how the tweet had caused “a social media storm” which had “captured the attention of the nation.” The original Berwick Rangers tweet had produced 8,000 re-tweets and 22,000 likes. The club was receiving more media attention than at any time in its history with the exception of 2012 and 1967 when the club caused a major upset by beating the other Rangers, Glasgow Rangers, in what’s known as a football giant killing exercise.

Now in case you don’t know Berwick Rangers are indeed a very lowly Scottish football club. Formed in 1884 they have rarely escaped from the lowest leagues in Scotland. And Berwick Rangers have really only one claim to fame, namely, they are the only English team that plays in the Scottish leagues. Berwick upon Tweed is just over the border.

So you would imagine that a team that has struggled not just on the pitch but off it in terms of finances and a fan base would welcome this explosion on line with the name of Berwick Rangers on tweet after tweet.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the club were not amused with their newfound fame.  Even if the offending tweet had outperformed not just Berwick Rangers normally woeful presence on line but the average numbers for most Scottish Premiership clubs, let alone one in the fourth tier, and that included even the other Rangers, with countless fans and even more resources at their disposal.

No, Berwick Rangers were not happy. Or to put it more accurately the club’s directors were concerned about the ongoing attention the tweet was drawing and how desirable it was. Understandable if you were running a multi-million business and a tweet like that was going to affect sales or customer relations but all this for a tweet that amounted to little more than the usual banter heard every week on the football terraces the length and breadth of the country?

By the time of Berwick Rangers’ next fixture, just four days later, the tweet was deleted. Not just that but the individual concerned – an unpaid volunteer social media administrator – had been fired. Working in social media you can imagine he did not go quietly and so there followed claims and counter-claims about his dismissal.  The sacked volunteer saw the whole matter as being a “generational gap.” In short, Berwick Rangers just didn’t get “the power of social media.”

Now, the club had been paying him nothing, but, believe me, they should have been because this man got it and gets it. Today you just can’t run a football club like it was still 1884. Times have changed, big time and the internet is here for good in case anyone at Berwick thinks otherwise. If you doubt me, then have a word with the present incumbent of the White House. Now there’s a man who knows and understands social media – whatever you may think of him or his policies.

According to a University of Southern California study, between 2000 and 2018, time spent online every week by the average American rose from 9.4 hours to 23.6 hours, with time spent online at home rising from 3.3 to 17.6 hours a week. During this same period the proportion of Americans accessing the internet from mobile devices rose from 23% in 2010 to 84%. U.S. smartphone email use jumped from 21% to 79%, with music streaming on phones soaring from 13% to 67%.

In the United Kingdom, a 2018 government report found that two-thirds of British adults (64%) considered the internet “an essential part of their life,” with one in five adults (19%) admitting to spending more than 40 hours per week online. Not surprisingly, U.K. smartphone ownership had leapt from 7% in 2008 to 78% 10 years later.

In the past decade the world has not changed as much as the world’s consumption of social media on line has. The world has shifted from television, radio and newspapers to on line, websites, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on.

Facebook alone has 2.3 billion users. To give some perspective on the internet leviathan that Facebook has become, comparison with its nearest rivals reveals that YouTube has 1.9 billion monthly users, and WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook) has 1.5 billion, with other websites lagging well behind these leaders. Twitter, for example, as of 2019, has 330 million monthly active users.

It is not just about presence on line, clearly, but that being on line is a way to make money. Increasingly this shift in social media also applies to football, just as it does to all sectors of business, and let’s make no mistake, football is business or it does not exist.

In the past football and television was where it was at. It was a media “marriage” made in heaven – both sides benefitted greatly in terms of audience, visibility, and sponsorship. Things have shifted. Viewing figures for live English Premier League games on Sky television fell to a seven-year low in the 2016-17 season. In contrast, however, media industry research shows that overall it seems sports media consumption grew by 13% during the same period – but that was because of content being viewed online.

So it is obvious that social media is a major challenge to football teams because that is the gateway for many to not only find the club but to start to consume its content. The other challenge is for the notoriously conservative directors of football clubs whose finances – and their understanding of club finances – have been dictated for at least the last 25 years by the willingness of TV companies to pay huge sums for live broadcast rights. What club directors such as these demonstrate is not only lazy but blinkered thinking. Watch, there will be consequences for football and in unexpected ways unless they face the virtual challenge ahead.

Put bluntly if your younger fans aren’t watching, never mind subscribing, to television channels – terrestrial or satellite – then why should broadcasters continue to pay hefty sums to football clubs to televise these games?

It also begs some more interesting questions relevant to all business owners. Do you retain your “fans” or seek news ones? And, if so, then you need to go where the fans – especially the younger ones – are hanging out. Failure to do so may not just mean fewer fans but eventually a club in administration – for American readers that means: bust!

Berwick Rangers had been given a wonderful opportunity to put the social media ball in the back of the net. On this occasion, unfortunately for them, if all too predictably, they kicked the ball over the bar.

There was one person who scored in all of this, however. The sacked volunteer social media guy? Now working in a paid position promoting Scottish football on social media.