Over the weekend, Manchester City thrashed rivals Manchester United 6-1 at United’s home ground – a result no punter would have predicted… apart from Twitter.

We took five of the biggest players from United and City who were on Twitter, and watched their accounts in the days leading up to the Manchester Derby yesterday afternoon, to see if we could somehow predict who would win the match.

From Thursday, right up until kick-off, the five Manchester City players we were following tweeted 90 per cent more than the five United players we monitored. Based on a simple theory that the most confident team would be more vocal over their social networks in the days prior to such a big game, we predicted Manchester City to win the match, a prediction Paul the octopus would have been proud of! Whilst this is only based on one match, it’s no doubt that a certain amount of confidence can help in any type of sporting game. We’ll be following many more games this year, and a lot more players, to see if we can predict how the rest of the premiership will play out.

Why the marketing industry should take note

Now whilst this is a bit of fun, there’s an important message behind this for marketers.

The huge influx of user created data over the past several years has opened up a real opportunity for organisations to gain a much better understanding of their marketplace. I’m not just talking about monitoring your brand name, what people are saying about you and your product, but much further.

With around 90 per cent of all the real-time data being created today being unstructured data, the challenge is to harness this wealth of information out there available to all to make more informed business decisions, and improve relationships with customers.

There is so much more to social media marketing than the industry seems to have realised yet, and marketers who successfully harness this new source of market information will be in a strong position to drive their business forward, increasing revenue and building brand value.

_{The Twitter accounts we monitored were: @aguerosergiokun, @Nanas08, @pablo_zabaleta, @OfficialMR2, @AJohno_11, @WayneRooney, @rioferdy5, @Ph1lj0nes, @luisnani and @D_DeGea.}