Big sports news starts on Twitter
Sir Alex Ferguson retires. #thankyousiralex
— Manchester United PO (@ManUtd_PO) May 8, 2013
Last week, in one of the year's biggest sports news stories, Sir Alex Ferguson called it quits on his illustrious 26-year career at Manchester United. Ferguson’s popularity on and off the pitch has been well documented (including on Sports Geek Podcast 002), and the online response to the news from fans and players past and present, was understandably overwhelming.
Sports stars show Twitter love
Thanks for everything, Boss. twitter.com/Cristiano/stat… — Cristiano Ronaldo (@Cristiano) May 8, 2013
The bosses work ethic, his desire to win + to make us better players were unrivalled. Thanks boss. — Rio Ferdinand (@rioferdy5) May 8, 2013
Sad day for football.The Great Man RETIRES. One of the GREATEST managers ever.SAF is 1 of the most infuential people that I have met #KING — Tim Cahill (@Tim_Cahill) May 8, 2013
As we've come to expect when significant sports news breaks, social media goes into an frenzy. Within five minutes, the official Manchester United Press office tweet announcing Ferguson's retirement had been retweeted 5,000 times. An hour later, that number had grown to over 100,000. It wasn't long before the #thankyousiralex hashtag was the number one trending topic worldwide, as reported by Head of sport for Twitter in the UK/Europe @LewisWiltshire:
The official @manutd_po hashtag #ThankYouSirAlex already trending number one globally. twitter.com/LewisWiltshire…
— Lewis Wiltshire (@LewisWiltshire) May 8, 2013
Analyzing Twitter data
According to Topsy.com the #thankyousiralex hashtag was used around 350,000 times on Twitter in the week following the news being broken, with spikes of 167,000 on May 8th and 140,000 on May 12th, here is a quick infographic we built with Infogr.am.
A look at Facebook traffic using Bit.ly
Fans were also encouraged to leave messages of support via a custom Facebook application, which to date has been clicked more than 240,000 times from a number of locations around the world, as explained in Sports Geek Podcast.
Facebook numbers, WOW!
The announcement was handled extremely well by Manchester United's media team, who were able to incorporate their respect and appreciation with a number of Facebook posts that oozed class and a strong sense of fan engagement:
But the most heart-felt sign of fans' appreciation came before his side's penultimate match of the 2012-13 season, where players from both Manchester United and visiting team Swansea City joined to form a guard of honour:
Professional til the end.
#ThankYouSirAlex