How the most watched football league in the world stays connected to its global fans: an in-depth analysis of the Premiere League on social media.
The Premier League is the most watched football league in the world and a global marketing phenomenon. Therefore, it’s not really surprising that its 20 football clubs have supporters all over the world. They show their admiration for their favorite club not only in the football stadiums and living rooms around the globe, but also on social media.
The huge followership on social media was reason enough for me to take a deeper look into the social media performance and digital marketing strategies of the clubs.
Before I started to write, I asked myself three questions that I wanted to cover for this post:
- How do the 20 Premier League clubs utilise their social media accounts to interact with their audience?
- Are photo posts still the dominating post type on Facebook?
- Does the performance on the pitch have an influence on fan & follower numbers?
To provide answers to these questions I looked at the performance on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram from 12th August, 2017 (Start of the season) until the 5th March, 2018.
Let’s find out who is top of the league and who is close to getting relegated – don’t worry, only social media-wise.
The Top Poster Of The League is…
I started my analysis taking a look at the team with the most posts because I wanted to know which clubs interact the most with their audience.
So who is the most active club on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram?
The answer for Facebook: Manchester United. With 2,095 posts the Red Devils are ahead of Newcastle United, who posted 2,010 times on the social network. A less strong focus on publishing content can be seen for Watford FC with only 541 posts in the same period. That is nearly 4 times less than the team from Manchester.
But if you assume that Manchester United is also the team with the highest activity on Twitter, you’re wrong. They only came in fourth with 5,617 tweets. Surprisingly, Huddersfield Town dominates the Twittersphere in terms of own tweets, with an amount of 7,602 tweets – a tremendous amount of tweets relative to the time period. Bottom of the league for own tweets – similar to the current table situation – is West Bromwich Albion, with 3,100 tweets.
The posting behaviour of the Premier League clubs on Instagram show similarities to Facebook. The two Manchester clubs are the clubs with the most Instagram posts, but this time the pole position goes to Man U’s rival Manchester City. The Citizens posted 970 times. Manchester United 963 times.
In contrast to their strong Twitter performance, Newcastle United show less effort on Instagram, with only 114 posts – 8,3x times less than Manchester City, the Magpies are bottom of the league in this category.
Visual Content Dominates The Premiere League
Not surprisingly, photos are the most used post type. 9,694 images were posted since the beginning of this season to the timelines of all Premier League clubs.
Interesting fact: The most image posts were made by Stoke City FC with 1,111 photos. Displaying visual content to their audience with the intent to directly speak to their users and encourage them to comment, like or share the photo posts.
The second favourite post type are video posts. Overall, 8816 video posts were uploaded to the timelines, of which 840 were posted by Manchester City. The Citizens are going strong on using audiovisual content for Facebook; A promising strategy when you consider that Facebook native videos receive 530% more comments than YouTube videos on Facebook.
The third most used post type was link posts with 8246 posts. This shows that clubs still try to attract social media users to their websites. The club with the most link posts was Newcastle United, who used the format 931 times. In contrast, Stoke FC only used this post type 13 times.
Live videos are used by nearly every club – 16 out of 20 Premier League teams make use of this feature. Only Watford FC, West Bromwich Albion, Brighton & Hove Albion FC, and Huddersfield Town didn’t make use of it.
Fans All Over The World
Every football club relies on them and all clubs want to gather as many as possible in their stadiums – Fans. An impressive number to start is the amount of overall Fans for all three networks which is as high as 321 million.
Looking at the specific numbers on Facebook, it becomes clear that the club with the most fans on Facebook is Manchester United with over 73 million. Runner-up is Chelsea FC with 47 million Fans. The position was held by Arsenal FC in the last season but they are now overtaken by the club from Stamford Bridge.
That the performance on the pitch can also influence your social media presence can be seen at United’s rivals Manchester City. Since the beginning of this season, they are not only dominating the league table but also gained over 5 million new Facebook fans.
The total opposite can be spotted in England’s north. Newly promoted Huddersfield fan base is the smallest of the entire Premier League on each of the networks. Among all Premier League clubs, the “Terriers” have the least amount of followers on all platforms.
But how do the numbers look for Twitter and Instagram?
Again the Red Devils from Manchester are ahead of everyone else with around 17 million followers on Twitter and 21 million on Instagram. Coming in second place on Twitter is Arsenal FC with a following of 13 million. Interesting in this relation is the fact that German attacking midfielder Mesut Özil (15 million Followers) has more fans than the club he is playing for.
On Instagram, the second place goes to last year’s league winner Chelsea FC with 11 million fans. Manchester United is not only the most valuable Football club in Europe, but also shows its dominance in the sphere of social media among all Premier League clubs. Only Real Madrid with 106 million fans and FC Barcelona with 103 million fans attract more social media users.
Extra Time
We can see that Manchester United is dominating the social media sphere in terms of fans & followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. That said, it also can be seen from the raw data that the Premier League clubs invest more and more into social media. Meaning, that nearly every team increased the number of posts and their audience on the three networks, compared to my previous analysis.
Finally, it’s safe to say that Facebook remains the strongest platform for distributing content for the clubs because it is the platform that has the largest audience. Out of 321 million Premier League club followers, 187 million are active on Facebook. This also explains why the posts on Facebook get the most interactions out of the three networks. Twitter with 72 million and Instagram with an overall audience of 62 million are also strong but don’t reach the level that Facebook has in terms of user interactions.
For the future, it’s going to be interesting to see if the audience numbers will even rise more. Since the start of the season, the clubs have already attracted more than 7,3 million new Facebook Fans, 14,6 million Twitter Followers and 8,3 million users on Instagram.
Did I leave out something that is important to you? Looking forward to hearing from you. Simply share your thoughts with me in the comments section.
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Nils is part of the quintly communication team. He is a committed writer with a keen interest in new technologies, social media strategies and football.
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