An impressive night for Hajduk, both on and off the pitch.
Another good result for Hajduk Split in Europe last night, as the Pride of Dalmatia saw off Stromgodset 2-0 in a great night at the Poljud, but there was another significant story of the night which may have gone undetected by the passionate Torcida fans inside the Hajduk stadium.
The latest phase of an impressive and orchestrated attempt to promote Croatia's most famous and best-loved club via social media.
As we reported recently, international followers of Hajduk were delighted when the club launched an informative English-language version of its website, the latest innovation of a visible increase in Hajduk's international media presence, which also includes a great new promotional video (see below).
Last night's game saw another first for Croatian football, the first match in the country to be covered by live tweeting in two languages, Croatian and English. TCN contacted Hajduk PR director, Alen Orlić to find out more:
"Our live Twitter coverage of the Hajduk match against Norwegian Stromsgodset broke all the records in interactions with followers. There were some ten thousand re-tweets, and impressions. That was the confirmation of the fact that Hajduk is the most social media active club in Croatia, especially when it comes to interaction with our fans. We have 45,000 followers on Twitter, there are some clubs with bigger numbers, but below us in communication with fans," said Orlić, after Hajduk made some important steps in opening to social networks, but also some other means of spreading its popularity.
"We have launched our web site (http://hajduk.hr/eng/) in English in June, that was our reply to increased international interest for Hajduk, mostly from our fans living abroad. One of the results was that people are coming to Split to watch Hajduk games. Also, Poljud stadium tours became more popular after this web site was launched. That way Hajduk became some kind of tourism product," said Orlić.
On other fronts, Hajduk has strengthened its web shop (http://shop.hajduk.hr), with growing number of products branded with Hajduk, from baby products to sneakers and club kits, even some dairy produces. Just before match against Norwegian side, Hajduk launched new kit of strips, and fan shop at the stadium had the biggest sale since the opening.
"The best selling strip was the third one, with pattern ressembling team flags. We have also very popular video clips on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/hajduk), like "We Live Hajduk", and a video from the European match against Koper. Since 2009 every Hajduk match had live coverage either on Twitter, Facebook or our web site, and Google analytics shows that 75 percent of viewers are from other countries," says Orlić.
"Our latest product is home.hajduk.hr, specific Internet project every fan can set as his or her starting page. It's not only a web site, but can also serve as a classic search engine," says Orlić.
