Can Facebook Fans Fill a Football Ground?
Being an Ipswich Town fan the new year has been one of excitement, expectation management and intrigue. In the FA and Carling Cup we had high calibre opposition in the form of Chelsea and Arsenal. For all of these games including the away legs the support was amazing, including a circa 30,000 attendance at Portman Road. It got me wondering why and how you get the atmosphere on a more regular basis.
One obvious answer is obviously get promoted, however being 17th in the Championship this would be quite an achievement this season and would fans pay (possibly more) to see a team potentially struggle in the Premiership? The Championship still provides excitement and is an incredibly competitive league, Premier League would be amazing but personally I’d rather be a “good” Championship team than a “Poor” Premier League side.
The slightly less obvious answer to me lies in Social Media. Ipswich has a following of 8,800 fans on Facebook. The group is very active on a match day and people are always giving their opinions as to how the club could be improved. What I want to know is what could be done to get some of these Online followers to follow the club at Portman Road. Some of these followers are overseas, others may not be able to afford the price of a ticket but is there the ability to work together to fill the ground for a Championship game? Ipswich do have four offers throughout the season where up to four tickets can be purchased for £10 per ticket.
I discussed the above with Matt Phelan, Director of 4Ps about whether season ticket supporters on Facebook would be willing to make these additional £10 tickets available to fans to make a match more affordable. I’m not overly wealthy myself but I am willing to do my bit and I’m going to give away 4 tickets (£40).
If our average attendance is for arguments sake around 20,000, my four tickets will increase attendance by 0.02% which doesn’t sound a lot but, however if a further 250 (3%) of our 8,000 odd season ticket holders were able to sell their allocation of four tickets to other’s that’d see another 1000 fans at Portman Road an increase of 5%.
So, over the next few weeks I’ll be pushing our Facebook Group and hopefully Ipswich Town can be one of the first Championship clubs whose fans use Facebook to fill up Portman Road.
I’d love to here your views and comments, either below or @mattstannard
Great idea Matt… Good luck!
UPDATE:
I’ve begun to spread the word on both the Ipswich Facebook Group and also on TWTD (our Fans page – http://www.twtd.co.uk/mb.php?m=v&t=104257#104257). So far I’ve had a few direct messages and Friend Requests from Facebook which is great.
I will continue to promote it and write some follow up blogs to let people know how I get on.
What would be helpful is ideas for how to give away the tickets in a fair way!!
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[...] of you may have read my blog post last month Can Facebook Fans fill a Football Ground, inspired by 1 Man, 1 Mission, 1 Small London Pub. My aim was to use Facebook to encourage Ipswich [...]
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