#TopOfTheLeague

ARGYLE have taken their first title of the season – Sky Bet League 2’s top social media team of 2014.

The Pilgrims’ topped the League 2 table in the Sport Social Media Index 2014, climbing three places from last year.
 
The Index grades 148 British professional football, rugby and cricket teams according to social media performance by their official club channels.

As well as topping the League 2 rankings, ahead of Southend United and Wycombe Wanderers, Argyle finished eighth in the overall standings
 
Four of the top ten places – Leeds United (second), Ipswich Town (third), Sheffield Wednesday (fourth) and Millwall (seventh) – were occupied by Championship clubs, shifting the balance of power from the 2013 Sport Social Media Index which saw six English Premier League teams in the top ten.
 
Other notable inclusions in this year’s top ten are Rugby Super League’s Castleford Tigers (sixth) and their union counterparts Leicester Tigers (ninth), from the Premiership.

Launched in 2013, the annual Index is compiled by measuring the social media performance of each team based, not just on an algorithm, but research from a team of seven people who looked at eight social media networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine and YouTube.
 
Four months in the making, the data was then analysed by a panel of four judges who presided over the final results, creating a league table which benchmarks social media success among professional British sports teams. Scoring included percentage engagement levels, percentage community growth as well as multimedia content posted on Twitter and Facebook, including video, images, audio, official apps and external links.

‘Red Card’ penalties of 2.5% were accrued for poor social media practice, including duplicate content, idle periods of community management, repeated spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
 
The Index, produced by social media agency Umpf and partnered by William Hill, includes an overall table of all 148 teams ranked top to bottom, plus nine additional tables showing rankings based on each sporting league. Full league tables are available at: www.sport.socialmediaindex.co.uk.