Football Media 101 – How football fans can share their views easily and quickly
It’s hard to overstate what a boon the internet has been for football fans. Fans can now share their views instantly and on multiple platforms, and receive responses from other fans in seconds.
Four years ago, Soccerlens was born out of a desire to share our opinions on football with a wider audience. The market for ‘general’ football sites may seem saturated now but for football fans around the world, there are still plenty of opportunities to share their thoughts and be heard by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of fellow football fans.
How do you do it? Here are some pointers to get you started.
Blogging
Fans write blogs about their team or about football in general, where they share their views with audiences of different sizes. Blogging is as central to your efforts today as it was in 2006. The differences are procedural – where you went through promoting your articles via email and through forums, you now use Twitter / Facebook. There are still quality sites that will give you space to air your views, and for the best writers amongst you there are opportunities to make money from this field as well.
But if you’re just getting started and want to cross that first hurdle – i.e. if you want an audience (writing is easy, getting readers who are interested in what you write isn’t), then there are a number of things you can do.
Start your own blog
A popular option and one that almost every writer ends up doing in their first year of blogging. My recommendation – reserve your personal domain, maybe put up a single page on it about yourself, but don’t start posting on your own blog. For starters, you have no audience and it’s a major pain to build an audience. There are easier ways to do it than start from scratch on a brand new blog. Secondly, football is a time-sensitive subject most of the time. What you’re writing about today could be irrelevant tomorrow. Do you want all your hard work to be unread AND irrelevant?
Starting your own blog makes sense if you already have a sizeable audience / readership. Someone like Iain Macintosh or Guillem Balague, these guys can definitely benefit from having a personal website because they already have a fanbase, an audience. If you’re not already well-known / well-read, it’s a bad idea.
Simple rule of thumb – established journalist / ex footballer, setup your own blog and get cracking. Otherwise, try something else on this list.
Write for a popular football blog
It can be the biggest blog about your club, it could be a generic news site, or it could be something intensely topical and niche. There are dozens of popular football sites around, and most of them are looking for free content. If you don’t have a writing portfolio already, this is the quickest way to get started.
The advantages – you can get instant access to sites that have over 1 million readers / month. You will probably also get some invaluable guidance / advice from the editors, depending on which site you’re writing for. It’s excellent experience for learning about how to get readers for your posts, how to write for the web, etc.
The disadvantages – it’s not your own website. The thing you can do to counteract this is to treat your profile page on these sites as a personal profile page, and promote that heavily.
I would also recommend that you stick to 1-2 major sites when starting out in the writing world as opposed to writing one article each for 10 sites. It takes time to build an audience, for the readers to know who you are and to come back for your next article. Plus building a long-term relationship with the site / editor will also help you out in the long run.
If your ultimate goal is to be a football journalist, start with a big football blog and stick to it until you can make the progression to paid work. When Goal.com splurged on Goal UK in the summer of 2009, where did they turn to? Good / great football writers. You’re not going to get to the top without building a brand, and partnering with an existing, visible brand is your best bet to do that.
Are you a football fan interested in sharing your views by writing for the Football Media network? Then read our Football Writers Wanted post and get in touch.
Forums
If you goal is more to mingle with other football fans as opposed to writing articles, forums are the best place to be. You will find quality team-specific forums / communities everywhere (and not necessarily just at the official club sites), but IMO quality generic forums have dwindled, although the likes of Big Soccer and community sites like Footbo are still going strong.
The difference between blog and forum communities is important in context of how you want to experience football online – forums are full of banter, not a lot is taken seriously, you need to speak up or you’ll probably be lost in the crowds, and members are quite loyal to the site. It’s not to say blogs aren’t the same, but as the onus in forums is on the community members to initiate / maintain conversations, it’s more distributed and therefore more varied, and you can find your own pace instead of having to write at a fixed schedule.
There’s usually a moderator or team of moderators who make sure discussion stays on topic, and you’ll want to stay on the forum mods / owners good side by 1) not spamming 2) not starting or getting sucked into flame wars and 3) contributing regularly to the forum with posts and research.
At the end of the day, unless you’re at a very popular forum (and then you have to be quite good at guaging the mood of a community, not easy to do in forums), you’re not likely to get as much of exposure / readership. But then again forums aren’t meant for that, they’re meant for banter and gossip, and letting off steam after the game.
Social Media
Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we consume football news online. Just as blogging made it possible for any football fan to write articles, these social media tools make it ridiculously easy for fans to track, share and debate the latest news and gossip.
It’s made it’s name by assisting journalists around the world to break news easily and instantaneously, and it’s no different in football. You can follow the top Real Madrid journalists to get breaking news about who Madrid are signing, updates on ongoing press conferences, links to interviews, information on upcoming matches, etc etc. Madrid is just one example, this applies to football across the spectrum, and of course to unofficial fans and teams and footballing regions around the world.
Football information sharing is made ridiculously simple by Twitter, but it can easily lead to ‘too much information’ and a case of you missing out on what’s really interesting for you if you end up following everyone.
Different users have different points of view on how to use twitter – you’re welcome to your own – but this how Twitter has worked best for me:
1. Pick your top news source for each topic you’re interested in – United, Arsenal, French football, Barcelona, Portuguese football, MLS, etc etc. Follow them, and if you’re using a Twitter desktop client like TweetDeck, you can create a separate filtered list for your primary sources for easier access.
2. Follow writers that you enjoy reading – and look out for recommendations for people who make it a habit to break news online. Daniel Taylor of the Guardian may not be everyone’s cup of tea but he’s quite proficient in getting the news out first on Twitter.
3. There are so many Twitter users that fans have to carefully select which users to “follow” (to follow a user is to receive their tweets directly, without searching for them). Fans can also sub-divide the people they follow to create more specific “Twitter lists”. Example: you can follow everyone in the Football Media network via the Football Media network Twitter list.
The world’s largest social networking site is an obvious place for football fans to share opinions. Sometimes it’s as simple as someone posting a link to a football news story on their Wall, or maybe a Wall to Wall conversation about football between friends.
On a larger scale, most football media outlets will have a Facebook page, where they make posts and fans can react with comments. Example: Soccerlens on Facebook.
The key to using Facebook is to understand that it’s built on sharing, so the most basic use is to share interesting links from around the Internet with your friends. But what you can also do is use ‘Notes’ to write your thoughts / blogs and share those with your friends.
You can also join groups like the Football Writers group which is geared to providing writing opportunities and advice for football writers. There’s plenty of groups you can find like this, make sure you pick one that is active and actually beneficial for you.
Blogs, news organisations and really popular journalists also use Fan Pages to help aggregate their fans and also share information directly with them. It’s a good way to get updates from your favourite websites although in many cases there’s quite a lot of crossover from Twitter.
I’ll keep this short – if you want to network online, a LinkedIn profile really helps. And if you want to network online with other football professionals, joining LinkedIn and participating in focused groups that cover your interest areas is really, really important. You’ll find new connections that you can tap into to discuss potential partnerships, and you’ll find new opportunities for you to avail.
Still, this is more for networking than for sharing your thoughts / views, but it’s also a nice way to network with decision makers working at places you might want to work at in the future, and there’s a significant segment of the business population that is more comfortable using LinkedIn than they are using Twitter.
Broadcasting
Last but definitely not the least, podcasts and vodcasts (video blogging) give football fans a unique way to share with and reach out to fellow football fans.
Podcasts
Podcasts are really easy for some people to do because they find it a lot easier to talk instead of writing. We’ve already talked about how to get started with your own podcast, but my advice to beginners is to start things off by finding an existing, popular podcast that they can contribute to, and take things step by step from there. Like starting your own blog, a podcast is tough to get off the ground simply because you’re going to have trouble finding listeners right of the bat.
However in conjunction with your writing, if you can gain experience in the podcast world, learn what works and what doesn’t, and especially learn how to promote podcasts, then it’s an added skill that you can parlay into paid work in the future.
Podcasts usually are better done as an add-on to existing sites – some (like Football Ramble) may be an exception but that’s one hell of an exception.
Vodcasts
Web video shows are not just the future, they’re big now. Only problem is that football hasn’t truly been able to crack this area and figure out how to best entertain the fans. Also there’s a strong affinity towards match-related football clips, giving fans plenty of existing video content to consume, so a video show has serious competition before it even gets off the ground.
If you want to get start in football videos, the best thing might be to build up your profile on a service like YouTube or Vimeo by sharing interesting football clips and practicing your hand at doing short video clips. It’s difficult to come up with interesting ideas right off the bat – not everyone’s Football Nomad. A lot of football fans spent hours and hours browsing through video clips – and if you can start sharing video clips that people are searching for (especially if you monitor the news and keep track of rising trends), you can quickly build up a following of football fans who like your taste in football.
As you can see, there’s more than one way to experience football online, and whether you want to write, read, talk or watch football, there’s something there for everyone. I hope this article has helped in you some way, and if you have any questions use the comments form below and ask away.
Are you a football fan interested in sharing your views by writing for the Football Media network? Then read our Football Writers Wanted post and get in touch.
You can follow Football Media on Twitter or Facebook, and you can also join our Football Writers group for writing tips and football writing opportunities.
