Article about club's work on social media
In a recent programme article, Club Director Mick Buckley applauded the growing Dons presence on social media, which is due in no small part to the efforts of James Booth and Jonatan Moller.
Below is a reproduction of the article, explaining the emphasis on growing the club’s social media channels.
Many amazing things have been achieved at this club over the last 15 years. One area that should give all of us immense pride is the huge number of younger fans now following the Dons who are not old enough to remember Wimbledon playing at Selhurst Park. Back in 2002, many of us wanted to keep Wimbledon in South-West London, for us and for future generations. And in what seems like no time at all, the next generation is now in place.
As we plan our move back to Plough Lane, we want to cater for the interests of our younger fans and for future fans too. While Wimbledon fans of all ages engage with the club via platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, communication via social media is particularly vital for our younger supporters, present and future. Regular fans know that we try to give as much of the club’s resources as possible to Neal for the playing budget, but in 2015, recognising our relative weakness in the area of social media, we decided to allocate funding to improve things in this area.
The club’s communications executive, Chris Slavin, does a fantastic job in providing the official website with content and handling the press, but we had no dedicated social media resources. To help us in this area we were lucky to secure the services of, first, James Booth, and more recently, Jonatan Moller, who has recently completed a six-month spell at the club as part of his Danish journalism degree.
James and Jonatan (pictured left above with Mick Buckley) identified that the numbers of likers and followers on Facebook and Twitter were relatively low, partly because we were not creating bespoke solutions for those platforms. They also quickly spotted that, with no Instagram or Snapchat account, the club was missing out further ways to engage younger fans. New platforms were quickly created on Instagram and Snapchat. New content was developed for each platform, such as new infographics for match days, more video content and highlights.
James and Jonatan did a great job. The growth we’ve seen has been incredible: at the time of writing there are almost 75,000 likes on Facebook, and 53,000 followers on Twitter and 11,500 on Instagram. We are building a significant presence online.
The #Wombley campaign for the 2016 League Two play-off final reached 5.8 million people on Twitter and 3.1 million on Facebook. It’s difficult to isolate the impact of social media on the club’s fortunes, but these efforts certainly helped to raise the number who went to Wembley to support Wimbledon to 23,000, and led to our pop-up shop in Wimbledon being under siege for four days. This video of the three FA Cup goals we scored against Bury in 2 minutes 36 seconds has been viewed more than 100,000 times, and watched and shared on Facebook by people all over the world.
The great thing about this club is that our success (or otherwise) is directly related to the way we pull together and make things happen. This is an area in which you can really help. Spread the word about the club by liking our pages. Send us your content – we love receiving photos and videos from you! It could be a video from the stands showing the atmosphere at one of our games, or it could be a photo of you wearing your yellow and blue somewhere on the planet.
Jonatan returned to Denmark recently to continue his studies. If you have ideas that could help the club to grow in this vital area, please contact me at Mick.Buckley@afcwimbledon.ltd.uk .