Inside Facebook

Now that both the college and professional football seasons are in full swing, here’s a closer look at how college and pro football organizations are using Facebook pages. Basically, pages aren’t huge for most football teams and their fans, but they’re becoming more important.

Pros Not At The Top Of The Game?

The NFL has been doing a decent job of tapping into social networks to reach its fanbase recently, but the official NFL fan page still leaves a lot to be desired. Fans are allowed to post the the wall, but entries are sporadic (predictably, there is an influx of activity every Sunday), and there isn’t much engagement between those running the page and the fans. The photo albums are sparsely populated, with no way for fans to add their own pics of games or tailgating. Those running the NFL page are starting to find better ways to appeal to fans, with a new NFL-endorse applications called the NFL Season Showdown. It’s a simple game where you “throw a pass” (basically, poke) friends, and earn points for your team when your friends “catch” the pass. There’s a leaderboard so the idea is to get fans competing to complete the most passes.

The NFL page has a little more than 242,000 fans, but most fans are more interested in their favorite teams’ pages rather than fanning the entire NFL — this is strikingly different from the National Basketball Association, which has 1.58 million fans. Among teams, the Steelers lead the way with more than 381,000 fans for their official page, with the Cowboys a distant second at almost 246,000.

One individual NFL team has taken a more interactive approach to its Facebook presence. The New England Patriots have made their Facebook page the official team site, after recognizing that fans logging on to check out team information were likely already active on Facebook. The move gives the Pats the ability to take advantage of all the features built into Facebook and engage fans in a more interactive way. It also gives the team a better handle on demographic information that it wouldn’t necessarily gain from its Web site.

Of course, fantasy football is a huge draw during the NFL season, and there are several applications that cater to the at-home coach. The aptly named Fantasy Football by Citizen Sports has over 200,000 active users, and FanSection’s Fantasy Football 2009 has over 100,000 active users.

Alma Mater Isn’t All That Matters To College Fans

College pages on Facebook tend to have a lot more activity than the pros, which isn’t too surprising considering the center of the activity takes place on college campuses, where there are a high number of Facebook users. College pages also seem to be a way for alumni to keep in touch across long distances, a sort of central meeting place to discuss the team, the school and any other recent events.

There also appears to be a greater level of interaction between school and fan on the collegiate pages, and a much wider selection of content. The Ohio State Buckeyes page has a very impressive collection of posts about past and present players, the team, the upcoming schedule and any number of fan discussions. It’s not solely a football page, covering the entire Buckeye sports scene, but the page is dominated by football during the season. So far, it has 198,000 fans.

Another set of popular apps is the FanSection team apps from Watercooler. FanSection has developed a very interactive template for dozens of college football teams, but you’ll have to be a fan of the bigger schools to get the most out of FanSection. The app includes forums, viral campaigns, fan polls, etc. to keep even the most intense fan busy.