Who won the social media battle between AFL and NRL?
With the AFL and NRL grand finals taking place over the weekend Claire Waddington looks at which code won the battle for social media attention.
Like many great rivalries – Coke or Pepsi, Uber or taxis, Netflix or Stan – shifts in popular opinion muddy the debate, but according to media intelligence agency, Isentia, there was a clear winner in the longstanding AFL or NRL tug-of-war over the weekend.
AFL social media impressions map
Among the 400,000 social media mentions measured from Friday to Sunday, AFL fans peaked at 92,000 mentions on Saturday night, with Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull both chiming in on Twitter and Instagram.
It’s not actually battle…
What is the methodology for this data?
and word-clouds are meaningless chart-junk 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk
The social media impressions maps shown in the article seem to tell a more nuanced story.
It would have been interesting if there was more analysis of the reach of AFL vs NRL in capital cities and regional centres. Not much point winning the branding “war” if most of your victory depended on Townsville. What’s the media spend there compared to Melbourne (or even Perth).
Also have been interesting to know about the impact of the Friday holiday on AFL traffic.
Bottomline is – NRL wins TV (and Twitter in this case) ratings because of its time slot.
The AFL had a global Live Story on Snapchat – I’m pretty sure they won when it came to social media.
AFL and “global” in the same sentence.
Is that a joke?
Rugby League is played representatively by a number of countries across Earth, the same cannot be said of Australian Rules which is played only by Australia. If you extend that social media map outside of this country I’m confident NRL would be much more popular than AFL.
i think it’s ripe to claim that social media had any involvement in a moment where millions were tuned into television stations. mass media moments of of glory; a nation outpouring all it’s good vibes at once; that’s a rare authentic moment for a country. it transcends smartphones, social media just doesn’t have any role in these moments at all. just sharing photos and shit post event, it’s never live, it’s never real, it’s never authentic.