New milestone passed on socials!

According to the Northern Premier League's delighted social media officer James Heyes, @evostikleague passed the milestone and stood at 20,002 at 7pm after another record-busting season for the competition's website and social media channels.

As well as nearly 10,000 million pages read on the official website by more than three quarters of a million users over the course of the historic 2017-18 50th anniversary campaign, the statistics for the EVO-STIK League's social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Vole surged past records only set during the previous 2016-17 season.

The NPL’s official Twitter account led the way even before the new landmark on the platform, cruising past the 20 million views mark on the social media platform in the 72 hours between the final full Saturday of the season and the promotion play-off semi-finals kicking off.

On course since the early days of the season in August and the start of the FA Cup qualifying rounds, the figures hit new heights in April thanks to a series of key fixtures and events to record views of 3,660,000 on Twitter and more than 550,000 on Facebook.

April’s numbers – 1,300,000 higher than the previous season – received a major boost from the 2018 Northern Premier League Player of the Year Awards, the event in Barnsley attracting a worldwide audience of more than three hundred thousand views on Twitter and over ten thousand more on Facebook after it was streamed live for the second season running.

Nearly 8,000 more viewers added to the online feelgood factor when they logged on to watch the first ever live streaming of Integro League Cup on Facebook last week while thousands more enjoyed listening to live commentary throughout the season courtesy of the NPL’s media partners at more than ten online stations from Yorkshire Coast Radio to Live Sport FM, the BBC and Black Country Radio.

Many of the listeners, viewers and website users came from the most unlikely of locations with only a handful of countries and regions around the world including Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Botswana and Greenland not harbouring at least one NPL follower!

The popularity of a number of new and existing online initiatives played their part, chief among them the thousands of listeners the EVO-STIK NPL Show's hit stable of podcasts entertained every week and the £5,000 in prize money the NPL’s title sponsors will hand over to the most media savvy clubs this summer for coming out on top in the EVO-STIK League Digital Challenge.

Even more impressively, no matchday failed to attract less than 100,000 views on Twitter and 10,000 or more on Facebook, peak audiences often far out-stripping those figures with a season high of 336,000 views on the final full Saturday after more than 300,000 views on Easter Monday.

According the end of term report compiled by the NPL’s social media officer James Heyes, the numbers were also consistent throughout the last 10 months, April’s record-breaking surge following a March when the NPL’s Twitter was up by more than 2,000,000 on the same period the previous season.

Images courtesy of @evostikleague/Twitter

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