Soccer is the world’s top sport. We dive into which country’s league is the champion of social engagement and how their clubs do it.
We’ve already gone into football and hockey. But it’s time to tackle the sport that dominates the globe—soccer.
According to Forbes, the soccer clubs (or football clubs, for our international audiences) Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Manchester United are worth over $3 billion. The 20 top soccer clubs are each worth an average of $1.16 billion, and that number is growing every year.
How does that value translate online? We took a look at seven of the biggest global premier leagues around the world. Some from Europe: England, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany make our cut, along with two North American leagues: Brazil and the burgeoning Major League Soccer of America.
We looked at each club in the league and totaled up each league’s overall monthly views from May 2015 through October 2015. The data is from SimilarWeb.
The FIFA World Cup and UEFA are consistently some of the most-viewed sporting events in the world. The 2006 FIFA World Cup had over 43,600 dedicated television broadcasts worldwide and cites 607.9 million in-home viewers watching the final match. With so many eyes on the game, it’s more important than ever to utilize the evolving social landscape.The total monthly views numbers for each league are substantial. The England Premier League (EPL) has more than double the views of Spain’s La Liga. And, even the U.S. and Brazil’s soccer clubs are gleaning more than 2.5 million average website hits a month.
[bctt tweet=”The @PremierLeague soccer clubs receive over 20m website hits a month! Seriously fanatic!”]
Social is a vital part of deepening fan engagement for teams in the NHL and NFL. The sports clubs and teams have built-in fan bases that propel engagement across social media.
Most soccer clubs still receive more traffic from search over social. But unlike more typical brands, they benefit from their dual role as entertainer and brand. And, yet again for sports – their product is content.
For the in-depth look at our breakdown of the football leagues, click here.
Social Traffic Vs. Search Traffic For The Top Football Leagues
On social, fans can connect with their favorites on a deeper level than before. As new platforms emerge, such as Snapchat and Periscope, users can get inside peeks into their favorite soccer clubs in real-time. And this evolving connection doesn’t just need to come from the soccer clubs themselves, or even players. Fans can find community with their fellow enthusiasts, no matter where they are located. Numbers like those show the soccer leagues similar to other sports leagues. The EPL clubs have grown the largest social channel for their league, by percentage traffic driven. If we look again at the trend publishers are setting, the soccer leagues aren’t far behind, in terms of opening the gates to large volumes of social traffic.
On social media, the most successful clubs talk with their fans, not ‘at’ them. Let’s look into how that traffic flows from the various social platforms.
The majority of traffic came from Facebook, while Twitter accounted for nearly 25%. Reddit, our usual contender to Twitter in other sports leagues, trailed behind at 10%. YouTube and other international channels such as VK, Weibo, and Taringa drove the remainder.
Both of our English-speaking leagues, the MLS and EPL, drew only 44-45% of traffic from Facebook. They had the most substantial Reddit traffic, at almost 25%.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s Serie A, Ligue 1, and Italy’s Serie A, all had enormous traffic from Facebook at 80%. Both Brazil and France had nearly nonexistent Reddit channels.
The difference in Reddit traffic can be attributed Reddit’s traffic coming primarily from countries where English is the native language or regularly taught as a second language.
[bctt tweet=”Soccer teams that score big engagement on Reddit are from English-speaking countries”]
Despite how well video should perform, YouTube is still driving less than 1% of traffic back to the clubs’ sites, suggesting that fans are getting their video content elsewhere.
Let’s Look at Our All-stars.
Our soccer clubs with the top average of monthly hits were also some of our best engagement drivers on social media.
Galatasaray sneaks in as the only club not from one of our top leagues. Forbes named the Turkish soccer club as the 20th wealthiest soccer club in 2015. Galatasaray has over 1.45 million average hits a month, and 25% of that comes from social traffic. Even clubs outside of the big leagues can gain traction from their social outlets.
Our most visited soccer club on the web, Manchester United, has an audience of over 67 million fans on Facebook. The club engages their fans in a variety of ways, all while maintaining their voice of being proud, encouraging, and accessible to their fans.
The current pinned post on Manchester United’s page provides a customizable experience for fans. By clicking through, they can create a personalized picture branded with the club’s colors and logo. In our screenshot above, fans as far away as Vietnam participated in the interactive experience.
The engagement continues with Manchester United’s regular polls. The polls give fans an opportunity to share their opinion, and also prompt them to click through to the club’s website.
[bctt tweet=”How to make soccer fans happy? Recognize their passion and give them a personal connection to the team”]
Over on Twitter, the engagement continues in 140 characters or less. Real Madrid has 5.87 million fans, and that’s just on their English channel. Their Spanish handle has over 17.6 million followers. They also have separate French, Arabic, and Japanese handles.
We don’t need to look at the English tweets to understand Real Madrid’s overall message. The majority of tweets have vivid, shareable images that need no language. There’s a mix of game-relevant tweets, along with what’s going on with Real Madrid off the field. These could be awards the players are receiving, or behind-the-scenes looks at the athletes traveling (and very much in style).
And some of this social engagement doesn’t need to be driven by the club itself. On Reddit, fans take the helm on singing the praises of their favorite club.
Let’s take a look at Arsenal, which has 35% of its social traffic driven by Reddit. The subreddit Gunners, is extravagantly branded with team colors, user flares, and banners. Many of the top-performing links lead back to Arsenal’s website. The fans are sharing that content and creating those opportunities for click-throughs.
The gray numbers on the left represent each of those links’ ‘upvotes’, similar to Facebook likes. The enthusiasm of the fans is evident in their effusive use of exclamation marks and caps lock.
Good content feeds fan fervor, and that encourages them to keep sharing, keep engaging, and keep exalting their favorite club. With such engagement and passion for soccer, there’s a goldmine for us to explore further, in terms of content and social distribution.
Next time in soccer, we’ll start diving into these leagues in more details. Standby for an examination of the content driving this massive engagement and inspiring fans across social media.
What’s Next:
1) Sports marketer? Take a free trial of Spike to work engagement trends on your team’s viral content
