How do people from different parts of the world tweet about sports - and soccer in particular? This question will be explored by researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), based in QUT's Creative Industries Faculty, when the next A-League season kicks off in Australia in October this year.
"Any sport these days, and any professional team, is developing its social media strategies, and Twitter plays an important role in this. Sport is also big business, of course - and what we learn about the engagement between teams and fans also translates to other forms of brand marketing and management," QUT Associate Professor Axel Bruns said.
"In our soccer study, it will be interesting to see how fans follow the games each week, but social media engagement also tides fans over from matchday to matchday - it gives them an opportunity to keep up with their team, and to show their fan colours online."
The QUT research team recently received funding to expand existing research collaborations with German partners at the universities of Düsseldorf and Münster, in two of only 11 projects to be funded by the Australian Technologies Network and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) this year.
The soccer study will be a collaborative project, with researchers from Düsseldorf University tracking the German Bundesliga while their QUT counterparts track the Twitter conversation about the A-League here in Australia. Dr Katrin Weller and Dr Cornelius Puschmann from the Düsseldorf team have just been in Australia to participate in two weeks of intensive research workshops with their QUT colleagues.
"It will be an interesting comparison between the two leagues," Dr Weller said.
"The Bundesliga is one of the most successful and most popular team competitions anywhere in the world, while the A-League is still establishing itself in Australia. This may mean that Australian teams put more effort into their social media activities in order to grow their fanbase - but also that there's a greater critical mass of users in Germany already."
This soccer study is just one of many collaborations which will occur with the German universities.
Professor Bruns said the new partnerships would provide the opportunity for the various institutions to share and improve on their Twitter research tools.
"Twitter is a new and rapidly developing space, and around the world researchers are only now beginning to develop the tools and methods to study it," he said.
"We're increasingly dealing with very large volumes of data that need to be processed in close to real time. Through our projects, we will be able to develop more advanced research tools - eventually, we hope to be able to comprehensively track Australian Twitter use on a real-time basis."
More information about the research conducted by the QUT team can be found at their project website mappingonlinepublics.net. Information about the CCI is available at cci.edu.au.
Media contacts:
- Sandra Hutchinson, QUT media officer, 07 3138 2999 or s3.hutchinson@qut.edu.au
- Michaela Ryan, QUT media officer, 07 3138 4494 or michaela.ryan@qut.edu.au
