Fans of big clubs like Madrid or Barça are not the ones who interact the most with their social networks. They are beaten by fans of more modest clubs such as Villarreal, who just won the Europa League.
Real Madrid and FC Barcelona add up almost 500 million followers between Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, according to an article published by Carlos A. Ballesteros-Herencia, professor of Journalism at the University of Valladolid, on the scientific dissemination platform The Conversation.
At a great distance, there are the 28 million from Atlético de Madrid, the five from Valencia and the three from Seville and Betis.
Another nine First Division clubs do not reach one million followers. In an intermediate place, five teams (Athletic, Real Sociedad, Villarreal, Celta and Espanyol) move between one million and two million.
The interactions of the followers are proportional to the number of these, so Real Madrid and Barcelona also lead the podium in this regard.
However the commitment of these followers with the social networks of their clubs it is something different.
The digital engagement of social media users, also called engagement, measures the number of interactions of each follower. Fans of the big clubs are not the ones who interact the most with their social networks. On the contrary, it is the followers of so-called “modest” clubs such as Celta, Villarreal, Getafe or Mallorca, who are the most active.
Meanwhile, the commitment of the fans with the Barça networks occupied the eighth position Among the twenty First Division teams, the thirteenth in the case of Real Madrid and the twentieth, for the 2010-21 league champion, Atlético de Madrid.
The big clubs are unable to translate their market value into the involvement of their followers in networks. They are clubs with a moderate number of members who obtain the greatest involvement of their followers.
Engagement, new object of desire
The study of engagement it arouses enormous interest both in academia and among companies. The engagement has been defined as «an interactive and bidirectional process that implies commitment or involvement between some subjects and some organizations».
Arisen to measure the job satisfaction, this concept soon passed to multiple fields, such as education to know the student involvement with their studies, or Electoral campaigns in search of the mobilization of the vote.
In the sports field, the digital interaction of users with factors has been studied offline, As the sports performance o la stadium attendance.
Feel the colors
The First Division clubs use almost twenty social networks trying to reach the different audiences of each one. From the professional orientation of LinkedIn, to the youngest followers of TikTok, or varied international audiences through the Chinese page Weibo, the Korean NaverTV or the Russian Vk. Or the different formats that Dugout, Snapchat, Giphy, Pinterest, Flickr or Issuu allow.
Thus, Spanish football clubs publish about thirty messages a day on the three main networks. T
Witter is where they publish the most, about twenty messages, three times more than the seven on Instagram and the six on Facebook.
The fact is that the good management of social networks, together with feeling of closeness and belonging, can explain the greater commitment of fans to clubs not as relevant as Barça or Madrid.
Made phrases like “feel the colors” reflect a true fact.
The fans of the club in their city have greater emotional involvement. Large corporations are physically far from their millions of their followers, oblivious to the human context in which their fans live.
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