Detailed Analysis of the AFL Women's Football Online Campaign

This report provides a detailed analysis of the AFL Women's Football online marketing campaign. It examines the campaign's strategy, which focused on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, to generate interest and engagement around the tournament. The campaign utilized tactics such as live updates, community discussions, humorous posts, and event highlights to attract and maintain fan involvement. The report evaluates the campaign's strengths, including the use of humor, community interaction, and frequent updates, as well as its weaknesses, such as potential for notification fatigue and a lack of specialization across platforms. The campaign was successful in attracting a large audience, with live streams reaching millions of views and demonstrating high levels of fan engagement and interaction. The report concludes that the campaign was effective in achieving its goals, promoting positive perceptions of the league, and maintaining follower interest.

Running head: ONLINE SPORTS CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS
ONLINE SPORTS CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Authors Note

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Executive Summary
The principle objective of the report was to evaluate and analyze a sports campaign held
online by AFL women’s football that aims to create interest, interaction and engagement related
to the major tournament in Australia among its follower and fans of football. The sports
campaign depends on the major four tactics for its promotion and postings in the social media,
which was done through sharing live actions, encouraging community discussion, sharing
humorous posts related to the events and providing events updates. Sharing live event updates
and actions helped in maintaining the engagement of its fan and followers. Encouraging
community discussions helped in involvement of communities through re-tweeting. The
humorous posts related to the campaign created positive views linked to AFL women’s football
and its upcoming events among its fan and users. Furthermore, all these effects through social
media contributed in heightening follower and fan engagement for the campaign leagues and
their tournament event. The campaign altogether proved to be a grand success. The campaign
posts helped in attracting high level of attention of the fan and followers.

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Table of Contents
Introduction:....................................................................................................................................4
Campaign strategy:..........................................................................................................................4
Fan engagement:..............................................................................................................................8
Strength and weaknesses:................................................................................................................9
Conclusion:....................................................................................................................................12
References:....................................................................................................................................13

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Introduction:
The 2017 AFL Women’s football event was the commencement of season’s top notch
women’s Australian football competition. The eight teams that competed in the league were all
associated with existing AFL clubs. The games kick started from Friday, 3 February, the season
ended with the grand final being played on Saturday, 25th March (AFL Women's., 2018). The
entire fixture was put on display on Friday 9 December 2016. The first match was played
between Carlton and Collingwood, they featured in the first match of the league which was
scheduled to be played at Olympic Park Oval which was also Collingwood’s home ground, but
was moved to Ikon Park which had higher capacity in January 2017. These integrated technique
or approaches helped in maintaining and generating follower’s involvement for making the
campaign adequately strong in terms of strength and ability.
This approach helps in achieving their goal of attracting the potential followers of the
AFL women’s football tournament. The media campaign could have benefitted from higher
specialization between various social media platform and usages (Gill, 2017). This could make
each page easier to understand and lowering existing spams for the followers and pages of the
pages. Several comments and more than thousand likes would come on each posts of the AFL
tournament. Furthermore, the viewership of the event’s broadcast would number to 15 million
and more at times.
Campaign strategy:
The online media campaign organized by AFL was designed to inspire and regulate fan
involvement with the league held in Australia. To attain this objective, the campaign was

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administered across the triple major and principal online social media platforms namely face
book, Instagram and Twitter (Littleton, 2016). The campaign showcased and featured posts all
over the major social networking sites, the posts included match updates, scores, standings,
player interviews, team showcases, funny clips, articles relevant to the AFL, while Instagram’s
major focus was on showcasing the spectacular event.

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The posts included fan interaction, followers and most of the prominent jury of the league
is found on Twitter. ‘Re-tweeting’ posts made about the event are the primary means of
showcasing the posts and articles about the event (Giulianotti, 2002). It helps in providing a
sense of interaction between the communities and also encourages participation from the fans.
Sharing live updates from the tournament is also a productive mode of engaging audience
consciousness and involvement. Followers are likely to stay more engrossed and entertained in
the event when they can view and observe the event happenings from anywhere in the world.
Fans and followers are more likely to watch the events from anywhere in the world from any
device which also encourages fan participation as they don’t need to be physically active in the
place of the event taking place as it is not possible for everyone to go to the stadium to watch
their favorites players or cheer for their respective teams (Weinberger & Gulas, 2006). This
principle is ascertained in AFL’s online media campaign as Instagram, Twitter and Face book
social pages all showcases the live updates. AFL’s Instagram page always shared images and
clips of the live tournament to showcase the event for its online fans. Showcasing of the major
competition itself is featured on the AFL Face book and Twitter handles during the event,
whereas Instagram only posted this kind of stuff.

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Platforms like Twitter and Face book, live action sharing on these platforms to drive
encouragement from the masses primarily takes another form: standings of the teams, scores and
highlight clips from the game (Filo, Lock & Karg, 2015). Score and match fixtures and current
standing scan help the followers to feel that they are up to date with the match and competition.
It also helps them in maintaining a track of the live tournament’s progress thereby assisting the
loyal event followers to preserve their active interest in the tournament. Sports highlight clips
which are shared on the twitter and Face book handles of the event help drive engagement of the

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masses and followers as the event is easily available to be witnessed by anyone and everyone
where ever they are.
Fan engagement:
The online sports campaign could be ascertained and viewed as fairly successful for
achieving its goal of maintaining and developing the involvement of the fan with the AFL
women football league’s followers and fan (Kunkel, Funk & Lock, 2017). In twitter and face
book, the tournament post were displayed to have thousands of viewers and users. The posts on
the two different media vary according to the level of interaction. Some posts about the
tournament only attract hundreds of likes while the other post can reach to more than thousands
of likes (as shown in figure). Moreover, the number of comments for the tournament posts also
varies. Furthermore, on instagram, the videos and images of the AFL football event also
consistently was able to gain thousands of likes. Moreover, such posts work to attract consumer
involvement by covering the various aspects of the tournament coverage.

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Besides these posts receiving high levels of attention from their fan’s viewing, liking as
well as sharing, AFL also involve with its online community participants. They form a
significant share of the campaign. Especially in Twitter, the tweets by followers, fans and
important community participants can be re-tweeted that would affirm its engagement and input.
This fostering of a harmonious relationship between the fans and clubs could help in shifting the
role of fan and followers into more of a supportive role (Elliott & Drummond, 2015). This helps
the followers in identifying the league more adequately and thus creating strong level of loyalty
or solidarity among its followers. Hence, this approach makes the followers more likely to
involve and engage with AFL football league.
The online campaign has proved to be triumphant in its ultimate objective of attracting
the community’s attention or interest for the tournament’s live broadcast. The statistics of AFL
tournament just after the event revealed that the events live stream crossed over 15 million views
and at times would reach to 1 lacks concurrent viewers (Vann Woodford & Bruns, 2015).
Strength and weaknesses:
In the current scenario, there are various major strengths related to the campaign that is
ascertained through the outline of the campaign strategy. The key element among these are

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prominent community members, involvement of fans, use of humor and moreover, the
showcasing of the AFL event through video and images of the tournament, highlight clips of the
match and placement or score updates posts (Duncan, 2017).
The humorous posts related to the tournaments are the major strength of the sports
campaign in various ways. As per the outlining off the campaign strategy, it is ascertained that
humor is advantageous in promoting positive options about the organization and very effective in
gaining attention of the followers, especially the young followers (Hutchins, 2014). This
encourages more people to follow AFL women football tournament more closely by engaging
with its events and community. Moreover, the humorous posts can be easily shared among their
friends and would result in gaining more exposure by being introduced to more individuals, who
might be interested in viewing the event or participating in the social media community.
Moreover, the interaction between AFL women football team and community members
through Twitter assists greatly in driving their fan following. Community engagement and

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involvement in discussions encourages more followers and fans to greatly interact with each
other and others related to the event (Woodford, Prowd & Bruns, 2017). The frequency of the
event updates about the tournament via Face book and Twitter is known as its strength, as they
can continue to maintain their engagement with their followers by reminding them about the
upcoming events more often. It provides the fan with live updates so that those interested can
evaluate the unfolding of the events.
On the other hand, the major weakness related to this media campaign is receiving
notifications for various posts every single day from the AFL women football’s page could be
quiet irritating and can lead its followers away from involving with the event or community. The
type of posts made in Face book and Twitter is different, which prevents it from presenting a
clear image of what the function exactly wants to showcase in the campaign and thereby
reducing the potential annoying spam for its followers (Chang, Yu & Lu, 2015).
Moreover, the other potential weaknesses of the online sport campaign is that it frequent
updating the scores about the tournament and displaying highlights makes the followers less
inclined to view the events or involve in its social community page. The followers opt for saving
their time simply by checking the match highlights, score updates and standing updates (Felix,
Rauschnabel & Hinsch, 2017). However, this limitation or drawback is negligible as compared to
the strength of the campaigns posts as it has ability to create high interest regarding community
interaction, involvement and viewership.