Following football on Twitter

Not familiar with Twitter? Watch this 2:23 minute Commoncraft video for a quick introduction: Twitter in Plain English.

Twitter asks people to answer the question “what are you doing?” in 140 characters or less – and surprisingly people do just that. It's a bit like sending a text message to anyone and everyone who's paying attention. “I am eating toast.” “I am going somewhere or other.” To some, this shared minutiae is fascinating.

While being told in 140 characters or less that someone is “eating toast” can seem a bit like social media overkill, Twitter also acts as a sort of news and links portal. This makes Twitter really useful from a different perspective; it makes it an ideal tool for following football.

Anyway, some months ago I set up a Twitter account for our local soccer club and quickly discovered that it was incredibly easy to embed the resultant Tweets (yes, that is what those little micro posts are called) onto the club's home page. This seemed like an easy way to add fresh content to the page on a regular basis and a great way to instantly publish our teams' latest results. Or so I thought. Unfortunately the idea didn't really pan out as expected; without willing volunteers to keep me informed of the match results, it was often a couple of days before the results could be found online, and in the case of junior teams not even then. Not so instant afterall...

The real value in using Twitter though has been the ability to “Follow” and share (ie “Retweet”) the posts of others - and in the Twitterverse there are a lot of people tweeting (yes, that's what it's called) about the World Game.

Once I had the club's account up and running I ran a couple of searches on the terms, “soccer” and “football” which returned enough results to start following the football tweets of several other twitter users. I started by following: FOXSoccerNews, goal_intl, Soccernet, Socceroos and TheWorldGame because these were the first football Tweeters I found. Each of these in turn followed a whole bunch of other football enthused tweeters, and these were duly followed too, providing new fodder for our club's Twitter-mill (okay, I made that one up).

Want to know more about Twitter?

Check out Rafe Needleman's Newbie's guide to Twitter or Arun Basil Lal's Twitter Quick Start Guide

Over the past few months the list of people our club “follows” has grown to 318, meaning that whenever I log in there are oodles and oodles of new posts: match results for games all around the world, comments from players, links to match reports, transfer rumours, match commentary and other football related news.

The “Retweet” function makes it simple to share any of these posts with people who are following us on Twitter, and because of the Twitterfeed embedded in our home page, these new and retweeted posts are visible there, for a short time too.

So Twitter is a pretty useful tool for staying up-to-date with what's going on in the footballing world, I have found it useful for quickly and easily sharing results, links and brief messages. I love that it can be embedded into the club's home page and I am impressed by the fact that Google's RSS Reader can send interesting links to Twitter too, but that's another story...