11th Jan 2013 - Latest News
Liverpool FC have this month overtaken FC Barcelona as the world's most globally active club on the social media platform Twitter.
Despite being one of the very first Premier League clubs to launch an official Twitter account back in 2009, the only way the club engaged with fans on Twitter until November 2012 was via the English-language @LFC account.
With more than 1.4 million followers, it's proved an incredibly successful tool for reaching out to fans all over the world, but for supporters unable to converse in English the language barrier has excluded them from joining the daily conversations.
That is now beginning to change with the launch of the first wave of official LFC international Twitter accounts that have opened up the club to fans in more than 75 different countries around the world - the first stage in a major club-wide initiative to change the way we communicate with fans overseas.
Whilst Barcelona and Chelsea remain ahead of the likes of Real Madrid, Arsenal and Manchester City, with five different language Twitter accounts each - including English and Catalonian respectively - Liverpool can now boast no fewer than nine different Twitter accounts, eight of which were launched within the last two months.
Official accounts for Thailand and Indonesia were the first to begin tweeting in November and remain the two most followed local-language LFC accounts to date.
A French-language account @LFCFrance followed - bringing LFC content to fans in no fewer than 29 countries across Europe and Africa - before the Spanish-language @LFCEspanol connected fans not just in Spain but throughout more than 18 countries in Latin America - including Uruguay, Mexico, Columbia and Argentina.
@LFCIndia, the first official Twitter account dedicated to Indian supporters by a Premier League club, launched on Christmas Eve and attracted just over 3,000 followers in three days while @LFC_Arabic, launched on January 1st and servicing fans in 22 countries, proved even more popular - amassing more than 9,000 followers in just nine days.
The most recent launches - @TurkeyLFC and @LFCBangladesh, tweeting in Bengali - again prove that Liverpool is prepared to go where other clubs won't if it means enhancing the digital experience for supporters. As with the Indian account, no other club in the world - outside of Turkey or Bangladesh - currently operates an official Twitter account for either their Turkish or Bangladeshi fans.
"We recently set ourselves the challenge of making 2013 the year when we'd bring our fans all over the world closer to the club," explained Paul Rogers, head of international digital development at LFC.
"Liverpool is one of only a handful of clubs that can truly claim to have a global following and as such, it stands to reason that for many of our supporters, English won't be their first language.
"This new initiative, to communicate on a daily basis with more fans than ever before, won't simply be confined to Twitter either. A comprehensive new programme of international activity has been developed to interact with supporters all over the world and despite this only being the beginning of a three-stage plan, the feedback from fans has already been incredibly positive.
"On December 16, we launched an official LFC presence on the Tencent social media platform in China and in less than a month, we've attracted more than 270,000 new followers. This is in addition to the 400,000-plus fans we already have following our official account on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter equivalent, whilst in Brazil, we've just this week launched an official Portuguese-language Instagram account.
"Further international activity is already in development for release throughout 2013 - including the launch of fully localised language websites - as we attempt to deliver on our promise to truly connect the global LFC family online."
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