Social Media isn’t much fun lately. Gone are the days of friendly people suggesting you follow their mates if you had shared interests, do any of you even remember #followfriday? It’s all Boris this and Jeremy that, Brexit this and impeach that and people arguing with bots and even bots arguing with bots. You know there’s a ‘but’ coming already don’t you?

However…you were close…social media can be very, very useful when it comes to placing inplay bets on football matches. Why so? Well, a couple of reasons really. The first of which is the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ factor, something you’ll know about as a Bet Dynamo Insights user. Maybe you don’t know actually, but on the Bet Dynamo Insights Page you’ll see smaller numbers over the green/pink figures, like here:

The Bet Dynamo Insights Page focuses on finding value in the football betting markets, but it also has another purpose, users can see the value that’s on offer and make betting choices based on that value. The smaller green numbers indicate how many people from our users have picked that event and so we see the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ in action on our website.

Wisdom of the Crowd and Football Betting

What though is the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ Basically it follows the proven logic that the more people who make a guess at something happening the more likely it will be that a consensus will be found and the majority of the crowd will make the correct choice. Have you ever seen those competitions where you have to guess how many sweets are in a jar? Well, it’s been proven that the more people answer the closer you’ll get to the correct answer and at a certain point the average sum of the answers to the question will be very close to the actual number of sweets in the jar.

Anyway, let’s get back to social media. In 2018, the University of East Anglia undertook a study called Forecasting with Social Media: Evidence from Tweets on Soccer Matches. In this study they analysed close to 14 million tweets made during football matches played during the 2013/14 Premier League season and found that when the ‘combined tone’ of tweets made during a match favoured one of the teams that team had a better chance of winning than the bookies’ odds suggested. Not only does the wisdom of the crowd work, but it can help identify value in the betting markets.

One other factor that can be very useful when betting is following the tweets made by a football club. Inplay betting can be a great way of adding to your betting balance, but it can be hard to know what a match actually looks like if you’re not watching. Let’s say it’s 0-0 at halftime in a Championship match, you can see that the home side has had five shots on target, but the away side are enjoying 67% possession and have had seven shots off target but only one on target. The stats show that the home side have been more accurate but it would seem like the away side is the better one. Well, by quickly finding the official team profiles on Twitter you’ll be able to see their tweets made during the first half and you’ll be able to see a better reflection of what’s been happening during the first half to help you make a better, more informed, betting decision regarding what market to place your money on.

As you can see then there are a few ways to use social media when it comes to your betting and as we’ve said plenty of times here before on Bet Dynamo, the more you know the further you’ll go. Keep learning and keep improving to become more knowledgeable about the football betting markets.