AS Roma and Omnigon partner on Arabic language webiste

Italian Serie A club AS Roma today unveiled its first-ever Arabic- language website: asroma.com/ar. The website launch follows a poll on social media that invited fans to vote in favor of the language they believed was best suited for the Club’s new official website.

On November 16, 2016, Roma opened polling on Twitter – asking fans to vote in favor of either Arabic, Indonesian, Portuguese or Spanish as the language of its next official website. In just four days, over 44,000 votes were cast, with an overwhelming majority – 84% of the votes – requesting an Arabic-language website.

Commenting on the website launch, Paul Rogers, head of digital at AS Roma, said, “We are thrilled to unveil our new Arabic-language website – created in this language to give our fans what they want. Our decision to allow fans to choose the language of the site aligns with our strategy to engage with them at every level of our digital

development. This particular voter campaign proved to be one of our most successful on social media to date, and the fact that 84% of fans voted in favor of an Arabic-language website is a testament to the huge appetite for Roma content amongst those in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Roma’s expanding popularity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is supported by social media metrics, which identify Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Iraq as the Club’s fastest-growing countries on Facebook. In fact, since launching an Arabic-language Facebook page in September 2015, Egypt has overtaken Italy as the No.1 country in the world for AS Roma on the social media platform with 2.6 million followers. Notably, Egypt has also been identified as the country that drives the most traffic to the Club’s English-language website.

To develop its Arabic-language website, AS Roma once again turned to OMNIGON, digital partners with many of the most important global brands in the sports, media and entertainment industries.

Igor Ulis, Chief Executive Officer, OMNIGON, said, “We are thrilled to again collaborate with AS Roma on the design and development of this new Arabic website. Since the beginning of our partnership, we’ve worked in close collaboration with Roma’s digital team to create an immersive experience that would resonate with Roma fans and supporters around the world. We are excited to roll out this new, customised experience for Arabic fans to further drive engagement and bring Roma fans closer to the Club than ever before.”

This is not the first time Roma have invited supporters to play an active role in shaping the Club’s digital direction. Twelve months ago the Club became the first sports team in the world to launch a crowdsourced official website, having engaged with fans on Reddit, the social network news site, and independent fan forums to invite feedback on everything from site navigation, design and content.

This article originally appeared on SportsPro Media's website.