Social media – or the exchange of views in a virtual world if you prefer – is making big news these days. If one looks around the stock markets one sees that Facebook is valued at $126 billion, which is not far short of Philip Morris International and Visa, and ahead of such industrial giants such as Volkswagen, Siemens, Bayer, Boeing, Schlumberger, American Express and 3M. Other Internet firms such as Amazon.com and eBay are also playing in the big leagues, while Twitter was floated recently is purported to have a value of $18 billion. The Twitter network is reckoned to have nearly 900 million registered accounts, although only around 230 million of them are actually being used and only 130 million are used every day. Growth this year is reckoned to have been about 15 percent.
All very exciting, I am sure, but how is Formula 1 doing in the world of Facebook and Twitter? Just to put things into perspective (and I do not want to get into fights about fake numbers) the most-followed Twitterer in the world is singer Katy Perry who has 48 million people following her. She is hotly pursued (in Twitter terms) by Justin Bieber is at around the same level, while Lady Gaga, Barack Obama and Taylor Swift trailing in the 40 million bracket. The first sports star on the list is Brazil’s Ricardo Kaka with 17.5 million followers, in 23rd position on the list. FC Barcelona is the next sports entity at 62nd on the list with 10.7 million, with Real Madrid at 71 with 9.6 million. Basketball’s NBA has 8.8 million followers. Tennis’s Rafa Nadal has 5.4 million, the NFL American Football league has 5.4 million and I gave up looking for F1 folk when I hit Nicole Scherzinger, ranked 240th with a following of 4.5 million. The highest motor racing number I could find was Fernando Alonso at 1.8 million, followed by Lewis Hamilton at slightly less, Jenson Button at 1.6 million and NASCAR at 1.3 million. Danica Patrick comes in at just under a million while the official Formula One Twitter account has only 668,000 and Ferrari can claim only 666,000. McLaren’s F1 feed rates just 478,000, followed by Red Bull, Lotus, Mercedes AMG Petronas. The former F1 commentator Jake Humphrey has more followers than Formula One and Ferrari!
OK, so F1 is lousy at Twitter. What about Facebook? That is deemed these days to be for older folks. How does F1 do on that?
The singer Rihanna is reckoned to be the most popular figure on Facebook with 78 million “likes”, ahead of Eminem (76 million) and Shakira (75 million). The first sporting figure is Cristiano Ronaldo with 67 million. I gave up looking for F1 folk after the top 50 but found that NASCAR is sailing ahead of the fleet with 3.7 million followers on its site, while the official Formula One page has 2.9 million “likes”. The Ferrari road car company boasts 12.6 million, but the racing team itself rates only 125,000. Dale Earnhardt Jr is the driver who is most popular on Facebook with 1.7 million followers, while Lewis Hamilton now has 1.6 million. Sebastian Vettel has 1.3 million, but never posts anything on his page! Mercedes AMG Petronas is the most active team, ahead of McLaren.
While not exactly a measure of popularity, Twitter and Facebook both allow fans the chance to have direct contact with the stars, which increases their value to sponsors and in terms of merchandising potential.
Interestingly when it comes to combined totals only a handful get over the 100 million mark: Rihanna leads the way with 112 million, followed by Perry (106 million), Bieber (104 million) and Lady Gaga (101 million). The highest rating sports star is Cristiano Ronaldo with 87 million.
The overall conclusion of all this is that while Formula 1 may be a big sport on TV, it is insignificant in terms of social media. That could mean that its fans are too old to be interested in Twitter and Facebook, or that the racing community is simply doing a rather poor job in comparison to other activities.
joeblogsf1 
Or that F1 fans are generally too intelligent to be interested in banal musings?
I used to follow some of the engineers, techs and knowledgable journos/ ex staff. Some of their stuff is actually worth reading sometimes but I’m not interested in what Lewis had for breakfast or what Mclaren’s dedicated social media manager is posting.
“Or that F1 fans are generally too intelligent to be interested in banal musings?”
Being snobby about it all doesn’t help.
F1 doesn’t connect because the drivers are covered in sponsors. Their ability to upset people is massive. Imagine if Hamilton had said on Twitter last year “Oh my that Coke was great.”…Lucozade would pick up the phone and start shouting.
F1 is so controlled, social media is not. They don’t mix.
Sponsors don’t seem to stop sponsor covered footballers.
I think it’s more just down to a lack of promotion on social media by F1
If it’s snobby to say I really don’t care what he drinks then I’m snobby!
I honestly believe the average Motorsport fan is into Motorsport because of the cars, the technology and the racing. Unlike pop star fans they don’t care what colour socks their idol is wearing that day!
+1!
Most of the stuff on social media is clutter anyway.
“Twitter and Facebook both allow fans the chance to have direct contact with the stars,” No they don’t. These messages of the stars are most of the time PR-approved text and when so keep the “distance”/”truth” to what the PR folk want it to be.
Sometimes you get personal stuff, but you have to dig very deep for that and waste lots of time wading through all the clutter.
And finally, even the personal stuff just isn’t worth reading anyway most of the time.
Most people are far less interesting then they think they are. 🙂
I spend my time on reading books.
speedy_bob (isn’t even sure what “direct contact” means when there’s 1 star and +10.000 people wanting to have “direct contact”)
I really like how you can sometimes sit back and take a look at F1 from a completely new angle to put things in perspective.
Personally I think F1, or maybe motorsports in general are not doing a great job. One thing is a singer can post a song, or a hint of a title, or a short piece of a new song they are developing. And off course there are loads of fans who then go and make “their own versions”, share them etc.
In F1, the technology is kept as secret as possible, the factory is only shown in PR shots at special occasions by (almost exclusively) McLaren, and I have seen a couple from Williams, drivers are forbidden to talk about their work (Alonso not allowed to tweet matters Ferrari), and FOM makes sure that any footage or images about F1 is pulled off-line as fast as they can manage.
Take a look at Sauber team on youtube
And? Virals do well on occasion but it is only passing numbers…
Oh, I have seen their videos, and they are really nice, but just check when the last one was posted, and how often they make these things. Since we had a Williams guy weekly sitting in with Peter Windsor in his video-blog there is no one who regularly gives real insights into what they are doing in anything close to social media form.
Sauber also has a really good and active Google+ account and community. The nice thing is that not only do they regularly post news and interesting video’s on their page they also interact with the Google+’ers who comment on their posts. Also if you have a question for Sauber and mention them in your post it is likely they will answer within a few hours/days. From all the teams the Sauber F1 team has the best fan interaction on their social media sites.
“…and FOM makes sure that any footage or images about F1 is pulled off-line as fast as they can manage.”
This to me is the single biggest screw-up that F1 makes (and I include stuff like daft changes to racing rules in that).
Think of how many youngsters (or people in general come to that) could be drawn to the sport by them sharing Youtube footage of dramatic F1 moments… posting them on their Facebook pages, sharing them with their friends… the whole “Wow, look at THAT!!” factor.
Kids (and quite a lot of adults) don’t want appointment-to-view TV any more. They want Youtube clips and stuff when they want them. There is SO MUCH potential being lost here, it’s heartbreaking. F1’s behaviour in this regard is literally insane, business-wise — it makes no sense at all. All that free publicity going begging.
What with that and the BBC/Sky deal (in the UK), It’s almost as if F1 is TRYING to keep itself secret.
If Formula E — to pick another of today’s topics — can actually be sensible about this matter, F1 may find itself in more trouble than it thinks, very quickly indeed.
I manage to get along quite well with neither Facebook or Twitter.
None go any way to justifying their valuations, and will eventually come down a tad when the truth dawns on their young users.
It may be a ‘generational’ thing, but none of our family use Facebook or Twitter, only the Grandchildren seem to have any use for it, and for not much in the way of meaningful activity either.
As far as F1 goes, the teams and F1 make good use of their websites in the main, and that’s what I much prefer.
Joe, as the totals include all the US data it’s bound to skew the figures but your comments are so true. Each week US College football can get gates in excess of 80,000 at many grounds yet Austin which does a fantastic job struggles to get that each day for the GP. In perspective no matter what we all would like to think F1 is really a minority sport.
That’s because it is nothing to do with him. Vettel, along with Kimi Raikonnen has nothing to do with social networking.
They have ‘official’ websites, but short of spewing PR guff, they’re just ‘holding’ pages to give an official landing site (and stop fakes cropping up/stealing the domain names).
Hi Joe. It depends on what Twitter and Facebook is used for. I am not sure there is much point in doing comparisons to pop stars. They have a lot of fanatical fans who care what their star is eating for breakfast. I think F1 fans are a bit more discerning than that. There is a LOT of F1 info on twitter for F1 fans to follow, including technical updates. James Allen has an excellent twitter section on his website that captures various F1 twitter feeds.
During Grand Prix practise, qualify or race, my twitter feed goes berserk. A huge number of tweets are made by teams and supporters and sometimes it draws attention to a problem. However, it’s the live timing feed from F1.com combined with the live video feed that tells you how the F1 race is progressing. Let’s face it, Twitter may be light years ahead of TV news at spreading breaking news, but F1 is way too fast for Twitter to keep up. That’s why twitter users tend to only look at Twitter or Facebook after the races have finished, for additional information.
This is in fact an extension of the point you have made previously Joe about the inability of F1 to attract younger fans.
It is true that the demographics of Twitter don’t come anywhere close to matching that of the general public but more young people (25 and under) are on Twitter than the general population. Most studies in North America at least say about 15 per cent of those with Internet access have Twitter accounts (maybe as high as 20 per cent or so of younger people) but as you suggest most don’t use it very often and a few use it a lot. It is though a greta tool for journalism.
Facebook is different and much more widely used – five to six times more popular than Twitter in terms of those with accounts and used much more often for a wide range of activities.
There is nothing that says either Facebook or Twitter have to be banal. In fact both can be great tools for pointing fans to interesting things to read as well as building support among a community. They can also work well for a growing phenomenon – double-screening – watching something on television while also using a mobile device.
For F1 both are great opportunities to build and retain audiences by providing them with information even when as happened in the last half of this year races are pretty tedious.
well look what happened used twitter.. 🙂 seriously though personally don’t use twitter as partly as Damian said I don’t care what PR/media managers have to say, or minute by minute accounts of what anyone is doing. Facebook is different slightly as that builds your personal profile likes/dislikes whether films/authors sports etc but then you find your newsfeed filled up with so many posts you have to trawl through them to get to the real people you actually know
Intelligent people, who are the majority of F1 fans do not wish their personal lives exposed for all to see on the web by facebook and twitter.
It’s well known that F1 fans are extremely intelligent, as proves their habit of watching TV for info. It took so long to get F1 on the internet, and now on social network that one can think the whole thing is very reactionary ( not a surprise come to think of the personalities of former FIA presidents).
Just like mentioned by someone here by a commentator young people are mostly not interested by motorsport, or by TV.
And unlike mentioned several times here by some, what goes on Twitter or FB is not necessarily of the narcistic level.
And thus those who use Facebook and Twitter are unintelligent ? What am I if use Facebook, Twitter AND have followed F1 since I was 5, then ? Only the naive or maybe unintelligent leave their facebook privacy settings all over the place so everything is visible.
Couldn’t the lack of interest in Facebook and Twitter by F1 fans not necessarily be an age related factor more the wish to have things of substance in one’s life. We would rather read your output than someone saying “Am at Heathrow business lounge heding for the sun, sun, sun in Abu Dabbi”. I must admit, the double points for last race does seem to be a move towards the Justin Bieber world rather than high-tech motorsport.
Precisely, I have absolutely zero interest in Facebook and it’s nothing to do with age.
For better or worse (probably the latter) the personalities with the largest followings have the greatest perceived aspirational life-styles with the prime focus being on individuals ironically being seemingly ‘independent’ of any underlying technology.
It’s not that F1 is necessarily ‘doing a rather poor job’ – more likely its underlying technology is too ‘predominant’ to allow its individuals mass social appeal.
I think Twitter and f/b work well for individuals but neither are suitable for companies. I don’t know why but when I have followed a team I find their posts/updates somewhat intrusive and annoying. Follow you, Scarbs and Dimi P. and a few others and they sometimes link to interesting stuff but the corporates, no thanks.
Very interesting analysis though.
Being a 38-year-old, I look at the younger generations and note that they are not very keen on motorsport. The poor handling of social media by F1 does no favor to the cause. The only case of success seems to be Lotus F1, that looks young and fresh. Its example should be followed, or we’ll end up a bunch of oldies talking about a near-extinct sport
F1 teams and drivers need to show their human side on social media. Lewis does that perfectly, he posts pictures of Roscoe and Coco or him training in the gym or travelling somewhere. Even Fernando has shown himself to be a normal human with a sense of humour. F1 drivers and teams are closed and locked away as Bernie would never make any money out of giving fans access to them. Lotus do it very well, showing a sense of humour and fun.
There are some great motorsport retro pages on facebook, showing all manner of cars and drivers from a few years ago to decades ago.
You ARE the younger generation mate!
In general, the F1 circus gives the impression that it wants to be a very exclusive club, and doesn’t want the grubby fans to be part of it. Obviously we’re needed to fund it, but beyond that I sense that we’re supposed to doff our caps and show gratitude for the smallest piece of information – or disinformation in many cases.
On the other hand, if I were an individual within F1 (drivers, for example) I’d be cautious about posting anything on social media, given the bitchy nature of F1 followers – and I include many F1 commentators and popular journalists in that category. The lack of respect shown to some drivers (not all) is no better than the poisonous reaction some fans display. An example was when some very well-known (and no longer respected, in my book) journalists spread unfounded stories saying that Jenson Button had stopped following Lewis Hamilton on Twitter – you could sense them wetting themselves in glee at both the story and the unfortunate reaction it caused. I’m not sure what F1 can do to control the bullying nature of the sport, but perhaps if they issued more real, fan-focused information it would give people something better to chew on.
p.s. Nice piece, as usual, Joe.
Oh, and btw, I’m probably in the “older fan” category, and I’m a fully-fledged user of social media. It’s now an integral part of business and professional life.
I completely agree. It has a very us and them attitude. Parading the drivers on a truck at each race does nothing to reduce this. The FIA/FOM old boys club attitude is shown very clearly again this week by lil napoleon himself JT and his entitlement rant. An ancient old boys club run by dinosaurs who haven’t a clue.
With the money these teams and drivers have, they should be able to hire some savvy media people. And for the idea of limiting people into bland speak,
does anyone else remember how popular (or highly disliked) Muhammed Ali, Joe Namath and (guessing) George Best were? Tweet away and connect with fans on facebook
I turned 60 this year so Twitter, as far as I’m concerned, could well be in Mandarin. As for Facebook, the less said the better.
Congratulations on being able to use a web browser then. Both are harmless, unless you believe the latest Daily Fail ‘horror story’ about them.
My godfather has the same attitude about them both. Like it or not, for F1 to continue it needs to attract a younger group of fans and it is currently turning off even the current fans, let alone attracting new ones.
to qualify my point – my godfather and father are the two folk who took me to watch F1 and motorsport when I was younger and hence got me hooked..
I followed a few of the drivers and teams, but as others have noted, they don’t post anything interesting or engaging. There are a few good F1 tweeters out there, but nothing official.
I think to do a better job, they’d need to be a lot more open and honest, which as others have stated goes against the teams desire to keep their engineering under wraps.
I would say that Facebook and Twitter penetration into F1 about reflects the proportion of the demographics that watch F1. F1 is low on teens and that is the largest part of Facebook and Twitter right now. But is it worth fighting for attention on social media when according to these stats………
•Facebook usage among teens in the U.S. has declined 16% between the second quarter of 2012 and the third quarter of 2013.
•The Netherlands has seen the largest decline in Facebook usage among teens, dropping 52% since the second quarter of last year.
•In fact, 19 markets, including Brazil and Mexico, are seeing a faster decline in Facebook usage among teens than the U.S. is
Social media usage is ageing as a demographic, so in reality you will be chasing the people you likely already have watching F1 on TV, just doign it with a new media.
So before Joe calls me an old luddite again 😉 consider this…. YouTube reaches more U.S. adults aged 18–34 than any cable network. TV is likely not the best way to reach that demographic if you’re after 18–34 year olds in the U.S., better odds reaching them through YouTube.
Many F1 teams have been putting media out on You Tube and probably for good reason. I am not sure Jenson droning on about Mobil one in your car is the best way to hook that demographic though. What is needed is for the short videos to be better youth pitched to get them to take an interest come race Sunday!
FOM / FIA / whoever else is in charge should have a you tube channel with a race highlights post the monday after each race.. but I guess the short one wouldn’t make any money out of that..
>>FOM / FIA / whoever else is in charge should have a you tube channel with a race highlights post the monday after each race.. but I guess the short one wouldn’t make any money out of that..<<
Sometimes building market with loss leaders is as important as making money directly. Getting the right demographics cant be done in a closed box they cant see into. As they loose free to air, highlights with the right presentation maybe the hook to Sunday afternoon viewers.
barrichello was the first f1 driver to reach a million followers, back in june 2011. williams rewarded such global popularity by not renewing his contract 6 months later.
Would you want F1 to be a popularity contest like “American Idol?”
Supposedly F1 had somewhere around 500 million “viewers” in 2012. I don’t think anyone would believe that F1 has 500 million unique viewers watching the sport given that represents about 7% of the total population of the planet and substantially more if you take out that portion that can’t even watch TV. Motorsport just isn’t that popular, especially with half of the world’s population; women.
Given that and that there were 20 races in 2012 that’s 25 million viewers per race. You could argue that there might a few million more than that as they aren’t the same 25 million every race, but I’d be prepared to bet that most of them are regular viewers. So say it’s 30-35 million.
Once you scale back to those sort of numbers and consider how much of the fan base is made up of the age group that would a) use social media and b) care enough to follow someone, 1.8 million followers on Twitter for Alonso and 1.6 million for Button sort of sound about right given the fanbase would split to their favourite drivers.
In the lexicon of the young – TL;DR – F1 isn’t really as popular as those of us who love it would like to believe, young people or not. This reflected by what you see in social media.
I think the number of fans on social media is accurately represented in relation to the size of the sport on a global level or compared to TV viewing figures.
Another important point to make is that in countries like Russia or China are different. China has their own versions of course and Russia does not do facebook but VK (and is the second largest social network in Europe I might ad!). There are other examples but these two countries alone represent a large chunk of the global population and so comparing social media versus TV is perhaps not such a good idea.
It can’t be a surprise to anyone that a Ronaldo would have ten times the number of fans of Alonso. Compare F1 stars to Tennis stars on Twitter (Murray has about 2.2m) or Rory Mcilroy in Golf with 1.7m on Twitter and I think F1 could do better but it is not so bad. Comparing F1 viewing on TV (where possible), tennis events like Wimbledon get about 400m viewers world wide and I think 2012 for F1 on average it attracts 500m per race (although in typical F1 style this seems a number hard to verify).
We also I think tend to think F1 is global when it is perhaps not really true. If you look at growth markets like China, a sport like basketball Franchise NBA attracts more viewers than F1 and everyone knows how ‘different’ the US is looking at sports like football (soccer) or motor racing.
Social Media is about openness and transparency and this just does not suit F1 at all. F1 should focus on making the sport more accessible to fans not just on Social Media. On top of that Drivers are not allowed to tweet (even Ferrari have now banned Alonso from using Twitter to talk shop) and most teams rather hire an engineer than a social media person and you can argue both sides of that one.
I thought this was interesting and somewhat related to the media discussion — apparently Red Bull is planning on starting it’s own English-language international television network, focusing on documentaries. They are such a youth-focused brand, I would have expected the channel to be web only, or something. They must feel that old media is not dead yet.
http://www.tvweek.com/blogs/tvbizwire/2013/12/pumping-some-adrenelin-into-th.php
Just to add to my previous post, I find the ‘structure’ of Farcebook and Twatter to be awkward to use compared with just plain old email for communications purposes. The issue is that the F1 company’s websites are too ‘corporate’ and yes, YouTube is an easier viewing platform.
I have an account on both Twitter and Facebook, but rarely use them, I don’t think I have ever posted on Twitter.
I feel the whole point of social media seems to have been drowned out by Narcissistic people who are too busy counting how many followers or likes they have to get the point of F1. Twitter has some merits and could be useful for generating discussion pre/post race. There is however no appeal in hearing what “Driver A” had on his weetabix.
Personally, I don’t really get the whole social media thing. I recently sat next to somebody 10 years my junior at a reception. They spent the meal tweeting about how “amazeballs” the food was, I spent it eating the food.
I believe a lot of this comes from people like me. I live in a not so great time zone with crappy coverage and in this modern day of “grey area” content available online I am able to aquire the coverage I wish to watch, with a delay of an hour or so after the race for availability. It is for this reason someone like me can’t follow F1 people on twitter or on facebook, as Spoilers will ruin it for us.
Also, I would add the odd time I have checked F1 people out on twitter and facebook it just seems way too outside of racing. I’m not much of a person who want to know what someone is up to in life outside of F1 so there’s nothing in it for me
Love the blog Joe, F1 wouldn’t be the same without your insites.
The highest motor racing star I found was actually Barrichello, with 2 million followers. I think it’s a surprise.
Not a surprise to me. I don’t really use Twitter but I glanced at Rubens’ feed once for some reason, and it seemed very warm, heartfelt, non-PR’d and genuine, like the man himself.
That’s one of the reasons I follow him. A very honest person indeed. And that’s a good explanation about why he has 2 million followers.
Another example of people responding while focusing on the wrong damn thing…
I’m a semi-old fart, have no use for Twitter, and think Facebook is the spawn of the devil… but so what? The point is that F1 seems to be willfully ignoring those who it will need as fans Real Soon Now… if not sooner.
Not that this should be a surprise, as under BE’s leadership F1 is focused on near-term wealth extraction while ignoring the long-term health of the sport… so, this is just one more example of negligent, disinterested-in-anything-but-Bernie’s-bucks so-called leadership. Let them eat cake, etc.
I find a lot of the views written above fascinating. Some of them are a little short sighted though. Whether you believe that social media is just a load of pointless “noise” or not, it’s an opportunity that F1 misses completely. The ability to get closer to your fan base, the people wearing the replica shirts of your team with the sponsor logos, is surely not something that you just watch go by? I personally think that Lotus do a great job here – no they can’t tell you their innermost workings but you get a real sense of the real team behind the corporate identity and get to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes.
Beyond that I’ve come across some equally avid fans of the Sport this way who take the time to discuss all things F1. How can that be anything but positive for the Sport? Last point; if more people are spending more time on tablets and phones then how is F1 going to to keep attracting more fans?
Speaking as an old git, the support of F1 has remained largely with us, our age group who were brought up differently to the way children are brought up (or rather left to their own devices) today. Many of us inherited the values and interests of our elders. That does not seem to happen so much nowadays thus my boys in their 40s, may watch F1 or not. But my grandchildren don’t.
I never miss it when it is on the BBC. I don’t have sky because my generation were taught to save up for something if you wanted to buy it and I can’t afford it. Debt was a bad thing back then, on a fixed income therefore, I cannot justify paying out every month for something I would use for maybe 10% of the time.
I have used twitter to contact JA and/or the bbc commentators during the race when I see some rule infringement and nothing being done about it.
But the vast majority of it is inane gibberish from a
Facebook as far as I can see is really targetted at 13 year old girls who have the need to tell the world every detail of their lives. Some of this is dangerous and will lead to identity theft. Teenage girls seem to have many hundreds of pounds worth of kit which is easy come easy go, they did not work to pay for it therefore they do not value it nor it appears do they value anything much at all.
It is against this that Facebook has a market value of $126Bn ???
Yes I know that Joe has a facebook page but cannot see why he bothers as it is just a repeat of his blog subjects with links back here. He has only two hands and several main customers, facebook is a time waster. We are lucky he writes here.
If used with flair and intelligence I suppose Facebook may partly duplicate the value of a website for a team or a driver as part of a fan club. If this is the case then web page designers best look down to a lower common denominator to attract the younger audience.
Im 53 years old and have started doing all the social media stuff for our family business ( teenage daughters insisted we should do it!).As a consiquence of that have followed Mercedes on Twitter this season , and I have to say they do a great job and its very informative and entertaining. I recommend it.
I should point out that on Twitter it’s possible to follow people using “lists”, where you’re not added to their follower count. I follow about 80 motorsport-related accounts this way. Doing this helps your main feed from getting too cluttered, and I can take a break from motorsport if I want to just use Twitter to talk to my friends.
>> The highest motor racing number I could find was Fernando Alonso at 1.8 million …
The king of two wheeled motorsport, Valentino Rossi (@ValeYellow46 on twitter) has 2.3 million followers. He posts frequently, and all posts appear to be personal, no PR speak, and show off his obvious extreme enthusiasm for his sport. He posts a lot of high quality photos and videos, retweets things from his mechanics and fans. He comes across as a humble ambassador for his sport in a way that none of the F1 driver accounts manages (to me… I’m a fan of his… it’s all subjective.)
Actually, my last sentence was unecessary – Mark Webber’s Twitter account (@AussieGrit, 845k followers) is similarly good. My point was Rossi appears to top the league on follower numbers.
(And as an aside, he has made his #46 a widely recognised brand, I’m curious to see if any F1 driver will pick #46 …)
This is a blog about cars and F1 specifically. It is about bikes
True but I think there are a lot of areas where F1 could ( in fact it already has, compulsory after race interviews) learn from the bikes
Ok, duly noted, no more comments about bikes 😉
However, on looking through Rossi’s feed there is a quite a bit of F1 crossover. He’s friendly with a number of drivers, having conversed with Webber & Alonso (and others) there a few times. On 20th September he posted a group photo from a cinema, about to see Rush – then posted very complimentary comments afterwards, saying “see it if you’re an F1 fan or not”. That’s to an audience of 2.3m followers. On 8th October he retweeted a picture of himself testing the Ferrari F2008 at Mugello. He is doing well at promoting F1 to quite a close target audience, with no vested interest.
I like your main article though, it’s an interesting point. I’m an avid F1 & MotoGP fan, and user of Twitter for a wide variety of interests, and I’ve often thought that the F1 drivers (and teams to a lesser extent) have a suprisingly low level of followers.
“Social Media” is a joke at best fostering a cult of personality that takes a person’s 15 minutes of fame and boils it down to 15 seconds, relatively speaking. Next worst thing to happen to society right behind “reality” TV.
What ever happened to privacy, the dignity of doing your chosen profession well without having to satiate the baying pack of nosey’s who want to know everything about you because they have no life of their own?
I only use twitter and instagram to follow things I am interested in. That being said, I only follow F1 teams and/or drivers with the hopes of getting interesting extra content, or be the first to know news of a special F1 event around NYC. I want behind the scenes exclusive photos or videos of technical going ons at the factory (understanding some things must be secret). You know, insight into the daily life.
Well, its been three years and none of those things have happened in any significant way.
In fact, you would think Ferrari would have tweeted that they would have a F1 show car parked outside of the NYC premiere for the movie Rush. I only found out by chance when my wife texted my a photo when she happened to be walking by. And why was the Redbull event in when they ran the F1 car in NJ so secret? That totally goes against everything said in F1 world regarding the impression it needs to make in America.
I agree, Here in the UK, if I want to find out about in-season test days such as the ones at Duxford (where I saw Grosjean driving a Lotus before they signed him), I have to keep an eye on non-F1 websites. Even when you can see that a test day’s been scheduled at a venue, you don’t know for sure which team’s likely to turn up. Yet it’s a great way for kids to get a taste of F1 and to see a car close-up, without having to pay a fortune. You have to wonder – why does it all have to be such a big secret?
I’m 62, have been watching motor racing since I was 5 and as well as running a successful environmental consultancy, and sitting on various BSi committees (so hopefully reasonably intelligent), I have both Twitter and Facebook accounts, which I use daily. One of my uses of Social Media is to find out when Joe, and other motorsport journalists that I respect, post an article on their website; it saves me trawling a long list of websites daily and links me directly to the article so I can keep up to date while minimising my time on the net. F1 considers itself the pinnacle of technology but isn’t using using modern methods to keep people informed and up to date.
I work in music and market a couple of artists on social that have million plus followings. There are less boundaries in music. Rihanna posts selfies of herself smoking dope regularly, for example.
I am a massive F1 fan and it’s pretty plain to see why the teams and drivers are failing.
Drivers feeds (Jenson, Nico R and Lewis spring to mind) are incredibly boring and corporate, nobody cares for seeing pictures of Nico making a watch or Jenson on yet another triathalon. People want nitty gritty, gossip and behind the scenes stuff.
Lotus were doing a great job, but that has fallen by the way side. Irrespective of figures I would say McLaren have the most boring, corporate feed. None of the teams create engaging content, their YouTube channels are all boring and too focused on die hard fans, Tooned is great but is not marketed well. I am willing to bet the average 13-18 F1 fan has probably never heard of it, unless they have PPV tv.
It’s far more realistic that social media is insignificant to real life.
The fact that Katy Perry is the most popular experience on twitter shows you the type of people that frequent it.
I find it ridiculous that we achieved high definition content years ago but the aim is now to feed content to people as a character limited text stream.
Of course the F1 circus has embraced it in recent years and are very defensive of it, because you don’t have to write much or follow the rules of grammar and you can have the latest news story fed straight to you ready to regurgitate. Also those without publication have a chance to be retwatted by some of the big hitters and get their much desired 5 minutes of fame.
It is appropriate time to make a few plans for the longer term and it is time to be happy.
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