Ever Increasing Social Media Networks of Football Clubs
Deep-dive into the social media follower ecosystem of football clubs
I have been quite intrigued by the way social media has transformed. From the welcome way to reconnect with lost friends / colleagues turned into a data mining, AI driven, money-churning ecosystem
I am certainly not complaining about it, it’s possibly a very necessary thing in today’s world. I’m just commenting on the intricacy of the ecosystem. To put it in a simple manner, social media networks urge people to put their content in and gain followers, thus can turn themselves into ‘brand partners’ or ‘influencers’ as it’s called and earn money through collaborations. In parallel to it, the networks mine the follower/user data and create profiles matching with brand requirements and generate revenues. From a modest start to multibillion-dollar revenues, social media has certainly come a long way!
As per Statista, advertisement spending on social media is expected to cross $230 billion in 2022!
The point I’m trying to make is, organizations/individuals who create content see the ‘followers’ as their most premium asset to monetize. This leads to an all-out effort to increase followers
This cannot be truer for the sports industry. Sports clubs see the followers as their reach and a way to connect with the remote fans. Therefore, this becomes their integral part of their commercial strategy.
This is what interested me most and so, I started tracking and keeping a count of the social media followers of the top league football clubs of the ‘Big 5 Leagues’ namely English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga and French Ligue 1, a total of 98 clubs. This contains followers from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.
I thought to share the key findings of the data analysed
A word of caution before we start. Let us not debate about the quality of followers, there would be hundreds of thousands of fake profiles, duplicate accounts, multiple accounts of a single person and what not. This exercise is to broadly present the overall picture
Football clubs: The Social Media Strength
Total followers:
98 clubs put together have a cumulative 2.05 billion followers! That’s 44% of the internet accessed population and 26% of the world population. Interesting?
Follower Break up:
This is an interesting bit. Facebook, er sorry Meta network, including Facebook and Instagram has a whopping 74% share of the followers followed by Twitter at 14%, YouTube at 3% and the newest baby, TikTok at 9%. Keep an eye out for TikTok!
Fastest Growing Channel
When I said keep an eye out for TikTok, I meant it!
TikTok is turning out to be the fastest growing social media channel amongst football clubs. In the last 6 months, from Q3’21 to Q1’22, TikTok followers grew by 64%! Facebook grew the slowest at 2%, but that could be attributed to an extremely high base.
In the next 2 years, I predict TikTok overtaking Instagram
Some more reasons why TikTok needs to be looked at closely:
a) As per the study from Omnicore in Jan’22, roughly 50% of TikTok’s global audience is under the age of 34 with 32.5% aged between 10 and 19
b) TiokTok’s maintaining a steady 28% growth rate every quarter
Short video content is here to stay!
Where did TikTok grow most?
Well, the answer is Serie A where it grew by over 130% followed by Premier League at 72%. Rest of the three leagues grew at a very handsome rates of around 45%-51% as shown below
League wise Social Media follower break up:
Premier League clubs continues to dominate here too with 36% of social media followers followed by La Liga clubs at 32%. Clubs of the rest three leagues have around 8%-13% followers. The way I see, it’s an effect of globalization. Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 have stronger local followers whereas Premier League clubs have a stronger global base
The Gap between the Big Small Clubs:
The gap is a big chasm. 15 biggest clubs cumulatively have 85% of the total so-called social media followers! It’s nearly the same ratio if you look league wise
It’s high time the smaller clubs should come together to combat the bigger clubs, probably they would all be better together as a combined entity in sponsorship, content creation etc. Maybe small clubs from a certain province combine together to offer a tourism sponsorship and so on. Value for money for all!
There are just some of the highlights. Much more forms of analyses can be done, please feel free to drop a note should you want to discuss further!
As I mentioned earlier, look at the whole picture as an overview. There are so many questions which nobody has an answer to. Like how much do the big clubs know of their social media followers apart from the data shared by the networks. Reportedly, the recently concluded Barcelona-Spotify deal could have been much higher had Barcelona FC known more about their followers!
Let’s keep that to another day!
Have a cup of coffee and enjoy the read, share and do give me a follow!