Four Four Two’s 100,000th Twitter follower

On Tuesday morning, FourFourTwo attracted its 100,000th Twitter follower. The team have worked hard to cultivate the following, posting to the account for anything up to 18 hours a day.

If a week is a long time in politics, a day can be an age in football: it’s a fast-moving game with 24-hour coverage online, on TV and on various message boards and forums. FourFourTwo.com was set up to bring the brand online and Twitter is the fastest-moving application of this idea.

In 26 months on Twitter FourFourTwo has published 22,000 tweets, equating to, equating to almost 30 a day. Tweets come in three main categories: news, features and callouts.

Breaking news tweets all start “NEW NEWS”0. As well as several self-written stories, FourFourTwo.com carries a news feed from Reuters; whenever a news story of sufficient interest goes up the team will tweet the headline with a shortened URL linking back to the site.

FourFourTwo.com also publishes dozens of blogs per week, which they link to via a tweet starting with "FEATURE". The team are also in the process of uploading hundreds of interviews from the magazine's 17-year history to tweet - and other suddenly relevant interviews have already been uploaded, starting with “ARCHIVE” and, again, linking back to the site.

Finally there are the call-outs. These can be appeals for help, for example finding regular match-going fans to compile a FourFourTwo Season Preview or suitable ‘reader questions’ for interviews too imminent to publicise in the magazine; retweets of worthy charitable (or fan-based) causes; announcements of newly-released magazine issues (linking back to a content-selling blog on the site, which also links to FourFourTwo subscriptions and digital-version online presences); or just plain fun.

The FourFourTwo Twitter team also try to spend some time each day checking the incoming tweets and answering queries. This also presents the ‘human’ face of the brand to the public. The FourFourTwo tweets have much success with retweets, noting dozens of RTs whenever a NEW NEWS story is posted.

Congratulations to the FourFourTwo team for reaching this mile stone.