In today's world of non-league football, top run a successful club it’s not just about putting a successful team on the pitch, things have progressed, admittedly if you have a club owner with bottomless pockets that can work to a certain level, but to be truly successful you have to be as successful off the pitch as on it.

In making that comment, I mean the running of a successful clubhouse/pavilion including income generated from a social facility including bar, function rooms and facilities that will provide an income. But that’s only 50% of the off the field input, the other half comes from the club website and social media feeds, because without those, people don’t know what’s going on, so don’t come and support the club. The gate receipts and bar takings go down, so the clubhouse/pavilion suffers and so does the team, it’s a vicious circle.

So, some people would say that the media element of the club is arguably as important as everything else because social media and the club’s website is an integral part of day today running of every club. The website is a vital link between the club and its fans together with players and let’s face it opposition managers are always looking and checking every source they can to find out things about their opposition. In my personal opinion there is no excuse in the age that we live in. why can’t clubs cannot keep their fans, the local community and public informed as to what is happening at their club.

Here at Darlaston town this season we have tried to change the way the club operates being more open and utilising every Media outlet that we have to grow our fanbase. The redesigned website this season has been the focal point of all the news, keeping our fans informed of what is happening on a day-to-day basis. In conjunction with the website we have used the two most popular social media feeds to provide links through to the website.

In doing so we are able to monitor the traffic via Facebook, Twitter, and who and from where our website readers come from, this is possible by using Google Analytics for the website, Facebook send us user numbers weekly, as do Twitter.

We are delighted with the way numbers have grown since the season started. In the last seven days 6, 973 people have viewed our news on Facebook alone, nearly 1000 people per day. Nearly one third have liked our articles and a quarter have shared them to their friends.

Twitter works in different ways to Facebook with only 28 day summaries available. In the last 28 days Darlaston Town 1874 FC has been as created 30,900 tweet impressions that's nearly 1100 per day that Darlaston town 1874 has appeared in a tweet. Our Twitter profile page as has been visited just over 2,000 times in the 28 day period all of these figures are just based on 36 tweets.

Facebook and Twitter are engines to provide referrals through to our website, so nearly 2,000 people a day are seeing Darlaston Town (1874) on their phones, tablets, laptops and pc’s on social media to try and get them to click the article to go to our website to read the news.

In the last seven days we have had visitors from our website from 28 countries ranging from United States, Holland, Sweden, Australia, Qatar, Bangladesh, Poland, China, Cyprus, Philippines, Ukraine to mention a few. Our website visitors are quite closely split in the last seven days 56% male 46% have looked at articles.

In the UK alone people from 125 towns have looked at our website, below is a list of the top ten visiting towns or cities to our site in the last seven days

London 16.8%
Birmingham 15.4%
Walsall 11.79%
Wednesbury 8.0%
Wolverhampton 7.9%
Willenhall 4.76%
Cannock 4.06%
Dudley 2.87
Tipton 2.65
Halesowen 1.3

Now the next six towns/city's are
Norwich 1.08
Nottingham 1.03
Derby 0.87
Kettering 0.81
Telford 0.81
Liverpool .59

So, you can see that all of the people that look at our website is not are not local they are not only all over the country but in some parts of the world these people do not look just once they come back and look time and time again on average our website will receive between 2,000 and 3000 visits per week we have a core of daily visitors ranging between 250 and 290 people that visit every day.

So, as you see social media and a club’s website provide a huge or create a huge audience and interest on what the club does on a daily and weekly basis used correctly the website and Twitter and Facebook can grow a Club's fanbase substantially over a relative short space of time.

The name of Darlaston Town (1874) is not only well known within the Black Country it’s appears the name is spreading far and wide. This has only been possible because of the daily posts on social media and the website, please ask your family acquaintances work colleagues everyone that you know to follow and to look at the news of Darlaston Town on a regular basis. As time goes on the website will contain more community-based news as more community clubs and organisations starts to use our facilities at the playground and Bentley Pavilion

Why not come on a Saturday afternoon and join our regular fans you coming to watch local non League Football in a friendly welcoming atmosphere the bar is open all afternoon excellent food and some say the best cobs in the Midlands are sold. Please come and sample what Darlaston Town (1874) has to offer, I doubt that you will go home disappointed