The new football league season is upon us!  After a summer devoid of much competitive action, I’m not really counting the embarrassment that was the U21 tournament from an England perspective, we can look forward to another entralling 10 months of football.  The first game kicks off at 7.45pm tonight with a match between two of the oldest clubs in England, Sheffield United and Notts County, who will start the 125th anniversary celebrations of the Football League.

So, to time in with the new season we thought we’d get an insight into how the Football League use social media now and see it going forward.  Not only that but we’ve managed to get hold of the person who runs the Facebook and Twitter accounts for the governing body, Andy Dodd.

Hi Andy, you are Marketing & PR Manager at the Football League. What’s your involvement in social media within the organisation and how did you first get involved?

Social media is just one of the things I cover at The Football League, but it is an ever growing part of my role here. We first started with social in 2009 when we set up our @football_league Twitter account. In terms of what I do, I manage The Football League’s accounts directly on a day-to-day basis in terms of content and monitoring, as well as taking a longer term view on where we should be heading with social media.

The Football League is on Facebook and Twitter. Why did you choose those channels and what are your goals for being on them?

We chose those two for now simply because they are the biggest and have the best fit with what we want to achieve. We don’t have significant resources so always ensure we maximise the impact of what we do – in that respect you can’t really go wrong with Twitter and Facebook. With Twitter, we set it up primarily to enable us to have a direct contact with fans and stakeholders – it gave us an opportunity to get what we wanted to say out there – but also importantly enabled us to engage and interact with supporters. The Football League, its clubs and its players are generally very accessible to fans and the media so it is only natural really that we have a presence on a medium such as Twitter.

Facebook is more of a recent addition for us – we set up a Capital One Cup page last year and then this summer have taken over the management of the npower Football page they ran. We’d helped them build the community on their page by working with clubs on things like their Fan Power Stadium, so it was great for us when they offered to hand the page over to us. In terms of social media generally though, media coverage in football is dominated as you would expect by the bigger teams but there is a great story around The Football League and the clubs that play in it – it’s a soap opera of a season and social is a great channel to help us tell and share that story.

Twitter is closely associated with live events, sports especially, and breaking news. Do you now see it as an increasingly more important channel for you? and do you work directly with them?

You could say Twitter was our first love, and it remains at the heart of what we do on social. It’s certainly becoming increasingly important to us, particularly in terms of breaking news, more or less alongside our website in that respect. It’s also becoming more important in terms of fan feedback – it’s a great way for us to pick up comments and views on anything that is happening – though we might not be able to respond to everything, every tweet that is received by @football_league is read. We’re happy with what we’ve achieved with the channel and find its flexibility really useful in what we do, but we know there is so much more we could do and achieve.

That’s what we’ll be looking forward to working on over the next year or two. We do work directly with Twitter and have always been impressed with how much they are there to help if we need it. We first spoke to Lewis not long after he joined and since then he’s helped us out in a few areas. As I said though there is more we’d like to do so we’ll be speaking to them about that at some point very soon!

You also have an iPhone app and run a podcast, can you tell us more about them?

We’ve had our app for a while and it was a big success when it launched. Digital is becoming more and more at the heart of what we do – we’re not just about putting on matches at a weekend but providing entertainment to fans every day of the week through our various channels. The app is looked after by our Digital Operations team and I know they have plans for it. Recently it was updated to allow single sign on with our Club Player service, so for the first time fans can get live commentary of matches while they are out and about. We first launched the podcast four years ago and it has become a weekly fixture for many fans – as well as people downloading it and listening via the website, it is also distributed to radio stations around the world. Plans for the coming season are yet to be announced but we should be able to say something soon.

With the Football League being the governing body of 72 clubs, to what extent do you get involved in how they (and their players) work with social media?

We work very closely with our clubs – as well as sharing best practice I’m a firm believer that we can all make a bigger impact in social media if we do things collectively. That’s how things like the #FLTransfer hashtag came about at the start of the year. We also ensure clubs use the same hashtag when we put on an event such as the #FLAwards, which again helps make what we do all the more impactful. Twitter have been helpful with the clubs and ensured that they have verified all the accounts – for the first time this season we will have 72 clubs using it as Morecambe, the last remaining club without an official account signed up a few months ago.

As well as working with the clubs on the content side we also work closely with them on the technical side. We own and manage the digital rights for the vast majority of clubs in terms of their websites, and obviously social media in very closely tied in to that. Our Digital Operations team have some very exciting technical development ideas they are working on so we look forward to being able to launch some of those this season.

This year is a big year for the FL with it being the 125th anniversary. What plans do you have for the coming season?

The 125th anniversary is a huge focus for us this year, and social media has already played a big part in our activity. We are the world’s original league football competition, and that is something we think is really worth celebrating. When we launched our activity back in March to celebrate the anniversary of William McGregor writing his initial letter to clubs suggesting the idea of setting up a league competition we did a campaign on Twitter to support it called #MyFirstGame. Everyone has a first game and the response we got was just phenomenal – again we worked with clubs to all launch the activity at the same time, but the tweets were still coming in weeks later! It was picked up by several Premier League clubs on Twitter too and even some clubs from other sports.

BBC 5 Live’s 606 made it part of their programme the following weekend and got some just brilliant calls from fans. With the season starting tomorrow (tonight), the last few weeks have naturally been a big focus of the overall 125th anniversary activity. We’ve used social to help make announcements such as the discovery of who the first ever League scorer was, and premiere out #FL125 film ‘125 Years Young’ which were very proud of – you can see it at http://po.st/FL125film. The response we got to this on Twitter was again just amazing – so overwhelming positive from fans who said it made their hairs stand on end and had really got them excited about the new season.

One of the big things we’ve done involving the clubs is run a series of votes to find each clubs greatest for various things such as manger, player, season etc. We’re half way though the process but it has gone really well – for each vote clubs go out to their supporters via social media for suggestions as to who should be on their shortlist. We then put the vote up on the fl125.co.uk website and clubs then push the vote to their fans, with the voting tool obviously also being set up to enable supporters to share who they have voted for via social media.

Some of the debates around this have been great to see – Middlesbrough (@Boro) last week with deciding which players should be on the shortlist for their greatest ever player is a nice example. This week we’ve also used social media to publish a whole range of stats we’d compiled on league football since 1888. We put them all up on the FL125 site but then spent a day posting extracts from them on Twitter which our followers some to love! Moving forwards, we’ll be posting lots of #FL125 updates over the weekend, particularly around our special ‘Anniversary Fixtures’.

I’ll be at four of those games myself so I’m looking forward to the challenge of doing it all while travelling between games and watching football! I think I’ll need a lie down come Monday…

After that we’ll be keeping the 125 related content ticking over and continuing the club votes until we get to the launch of our special anniversary exhibition at the National Football Museum in Manchester in September. We’ll be doing some social media activity around that launch, while we’re working with the museum to look at integrating Twitter into the exhibition itself which they have never done before to add interaction.

Finally, how do you see the FL utilising these new ways of communicating with fans and engaging with them in the future?

We’re thinking of new ways all the time – how we use social has evolved enormously over the last few years and it will continue to do so. It really is a better way than anything else for us to communicate directly with a large number of fans on both a collective and individual basis. For us that has just changed the way we do things completely.