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Football in Brazil is really widespread. Capacities expressed on pitches by Brazilian clubs are known worldwide, as demonstrated by the fact that Corinthians is Club World Cup champion at the moment.
And many Brazilian football players enchanted worldwide public becoming true icons: from Pelé to Ronaldo, to the young stars of today’s brasileiro football.
The question is: how do they behave on social networks?
There’s actually a little premise to make: Brazil today is one of the most interesting digital scenarios, being the second biggest population on both Twitter and Facebook, as we’ve discussed several times. And this is clearly reflected on the marketing approach of several big brands: as an example, the Brazilian National Team main sponsor – Itaú Bank – is extremely active on digital channels, with a very fresh mood.
Plus we have to consider that nowadays sport clubs have embraced some of the promotional logics of entertainment products; we’ve already seen how this can be applied to the social media presence of European football clubs in China.
Therefore, for all these reasons we decided to analyze the digital presence (on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) of the main Brazilian clubs, and of some significant football players.
Clubs
Let’s start with a tab showing the major clubs’s presences on social media, just to have a quick idea of what are the figures related to this phenomenon. Numbers are updated to April 2013:
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Talking about Facebook I’ve took in consideration the number of fans and the PTA rate (People Talking About). In order to refer to more exact data when talking about interaction generated by single pages, I calculated the percentage of PTA depending on the number of fans of each page.
Corinthians is a football club that can count on a major number of Facebook fans, followed by Flamengo and Sao Paulo.
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Timao has the highest number of PTA, but taking into consideration the percentage data the clubs generating more interaction depending on number of fans they have are Botafogo (22,1) and Gremio (11,4).
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What do clubs offer to their fans?
Generally every examined page submits a lot of interesting content in order to give a daily update about the club to the fans.
For example Corinthians posts a lot of photographic material related to the club itself (trainings, moments before matches, etc.) and during matches the page is updated in real time in case of goals. This can be considered a clever way to communicate with fans and generate interactions, in a way that is more close to Twitter.
Corinthians, Palmeiras, Santos and Botafogo allow their fans to customize their personal Facebook profiles by using as profile pic the avatar of their beloved club.
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Flamengo inserted a specific tab to host a contest. Fans, by answering some questions, could win prizes related to the club.
How about the other channels?
In the matter of Twitter, Corinthians is the king club again, followed by Flamengo.
It is also interesting to analyze clubs’ presence on Instagram. Only 4 club of the 10 considered have an official account. Surprisingly Vasco Da Gama is the club having the higher number of fans.
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Not only clubs
But it does not just turn everything around football clubs: in today’s world – where top sport players are actually some sort of pop-stars – we decided to also focus on the social network presence of famous Brazilian football players, to understand who uses social media in the best way.
Taking into consideration only the still active players we see that Ricardo Kakà with his 21.840.510 fans is actually the king of Facebook.
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Kakà is followed by the young lineman Santos Neymar with 8.850.362 fans.
More detached we find Ronaldinho with 7.289. 433 fans and the Barcelona’s fullback Dani Alves with 1.810.120 fans.
Hierarchy doesn’t change on Twitter . The most followed is Kaka with 14.913.860 followers, and then we find Neymar with his 6.359.188 followers.
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Again more detached follow Ronaldinho with 5.612.937 followers, Dani Alves with 2.069.166 and Luis Fabiano with 1.503.900 followers.
On Instagram the top-scorer is Neymar with 919.881 followers. The young lineman is very active on this social network, where he treats his fans by posting a lot of photos from his everyday life.
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To follow we have the same old Kakà with 755.739, Marcelo with 301.472 and David Luiz with 237,055 followers.
The case of Pato is really curious: his unique official account is actually the Instagram one.
We can easily say that Instagram is one of the favourite social networks by Brazilian champions, through which we can have a look also to their life out of the pitches.
Once again, we can state that Brazil is on top of digital trends.
Marco Fey