Manchester United are the fastest growing Premier League club across a majority of social media platforms according to SportSocial, a new platform for measuring social media activity in sport. The Red Devils have achieved a larger MoM growth between November and December on all the platforms they are active on then any of their competitors.

Sport Social, from sport digital consultancy NineteenEightyFour, provides rights holders and sports brands with a one-stop destination to view how their club or brand fares when compared with their on-the-field competition. Sport Social takes twice-daily feeds from the 5 most popular social platforms Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google+, for all brands within a competition. It then ranks them based on followers, and provides the ability for account growth to be analysed at daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly intervals.

Aaron Syed Jaffery, Managing Director of NineteenEightyFour and good friend of UKSN, said,

‘There is a wealth of opinion on how best to measure social media activity. SportSocial measures the one element that is common to all platforms – follower figures. Based on this, we can see that Manchester United’s new social strategy this season is paying dividends in growing their social reach, despite some less than optimum on-the-field performances.

“However, we agree user engagement is the key to a successful campaign. So we have gone deeper and enabled users to see further social metrics at a glance, including the number of Tweets, Fans talking about, number of photo’s posted, video views and +1’s to name a few. Users can slice and dice the figures as they best feel fits their campaigns and help them to measure their social media activity against their on-the-field competition over time.”

SportSocial also enables users to be one-click away from viewing any social profile, as these are embedded within each listing. And supporting the real-time ethos of the league tables is a live Twitter feed of relevant hashtags for users to see what is being discussed around the subjects of #sportbiz, #digisport, #smsports and #sponsorship, amongst others.

At launch, SportSocial lists all English Premier League and Football League clubs sponsored by leading football industry magazine, fcbusiness, as well as all clubs in Rugby Union’s Aviva Premiership. In addition, users can see social league tables for Spain’s La Liga, the UEFA Champions League and Europa Cup, as well as for F1 Racing Drivers and the Top Men’s Tennis players on the ATP Tour.

Aaron Gourley, Deputy Editor of fcbusiness, added,

“Social media has become an integral component of a football club’s marketing and communications strategy over the last few years. Not only has it allowed clubs to reconnect with many fans that were beginning to feel disenfranchised it has also become an incredibly powerful tool for sponsorship activation activities.

“The SportSocial league tables give clubs an opportunity to track how they are performing against their peers and will become an incredibly useful tool for anyone interested in social and digital media in sport.”

In coming weeks more leagues will be added to SportSocial including the Bundesliga, Eredivisie, Ligue 1 and Serie A, with plans to add more sports in January 2014.