Heart, Rebels lead Twitter revolution in Australian sport Melbourne Heart's Richard Garcia picked up some extra Twitter followers after this club initiative. THEY may not have the social media pull of a Barcelona or Los Angeles Lakers, but the Melbourne Heart and Melbourne Rebels are going out of their way to engage their fans interactively. The newcomers to Melbourne's sporting scene are but a drop in the social media ocean compared to some of the big guns of world sport. Spanish soccer giant Barcelona is the most popular sporting club on both Facebook and Twitter. The Catalans have nearly 42.5 million Facebook fans and almost nine million Twitter followers. The Lakers, the most popular NBA team, have over 16 million Facebook fans and three million Twitter followers. The NFL's most popular team, the Dallas Cowboys, has five million and 560,000 respectively, while baseball's New York Yankees come in with six million and 900,000. Meanwhile, the A-League's Heart, who just finished its third season, has 36,953 Facebook fans and 11,643 Twitter followers while Super Rugby's Rebels, also in their third season, come in with 18,497 and 11,454. That doesn't stop the clubs giving their fans the most intimate look possible at their teams throughout the season. Melbourne Rebels media manager Adam Freier, himself a former Rebels player, said social media was key to winning the support of new fans. "What we are trying to ensure and we need to do better - and all of our resources are actually going to start pouring into this - is to actually be responsive on social media," Freier said. And particularly when an event such as the Kurtley Beale-Cooper Vuna incident occurs, we just wanted to make sure that we communicated to our fans through social media as best as we could. You say social media, we still say it falls in the same realm as emailing someone direct because it is a form of electronic media, so any email that comes to the club - especially during that Kurtley-Cooper incident - we respond to. Everything is going to go online, every punter and every stakeholder of rugby now has the right to feel like they are a part of that inner sanctum experience. So we are putting up photos on Instagram of what the changing rooms look like, putting videos of coach Damien Hill and the captain up on YouTube. We need to make everyone feel as though they are a part of the club. Heart made history this season when it plastered each players' Twitter handle - assuming they had one - on the back of their shirt for a one-off match against Perth Glory. "We have seen the power of social media and its ability to allow fans to interact with one another," Heart chief executive Scott Munn said at the time. And now we are giving fans and viewers the ultimate digital connection with their Heart stars. Just as Melbourne's sporting market is competitive as a whole, the battle in the social media domain is just as intense. Geelong has taken fan interaction to a new level this year by allowing fans to vote on Twitter about which side of the coin captain Joel Selwood should select at the toss for each of its home games this year. North Melbourne provides engagement between players and fans right up until game time as interviews with fans are posted on its website and on Twitter from the pre-match preparation in the rooms.