Twitter shifting to insta also in judo

Judoka travel a lot, are used to go public and communicate a lot during travelling and to get funding for their activities. One of the most popular social media besides Facebook has always been twitter. But also among the top twitter accounts, twitter isn’t that popular anymore.

Obviously some of the top athletes gained a lot popularity because of non-judo activities, such as Ronda Rousey with her amazing MMA career becoming the most dominant athlete alive over all sports. Or former World Champion and Olympic finalist Shinichi Shinohara who’s star is rising on TV in Japan. His account is still going sky high with this month another 14% gain. Some other judoka on twitter got a lot of new followers due to TV appearances in survival shows or being TV host.

Judo super stars like Teddy Riner with over 400,000 followers and Tadahiro Nomura with over 60k followers are still rising, but not a crazy as in the past. The 200 top judo twitter accounts in the world grew by 1.18% in January, more and more even have negative growth.

In February Shinichi Shinohara was the fastest riser with another 14% followed by Japanese World Champion Ryunosuke Haga (+7%). Another World Champion, Gevrise Emane (FRA) gained another 6% in January, same for Erika Miranda and former Judoka, now MMA rookie Nick Hein.

The Olympic Games will give some of the top athletes another social media impulse as many fans outside judo will follow the Olympians. Especially the British athletes benefit from the London Olympics in 2012. However in general popularity of twitter is changing towards Instagram, which is more focused on photos. The IJF is obviously the most popular federation on twitter with 32,600 followers, meanwhile IJF attracted 48,600 followers on ‘insta’. Mega star Ronda Rousey has 7.4m followers. Ronda sells, but who‘s the next judoka to benefit from the world’s social media? Ilias Iliadis is on the right track with 38.600 followers.