El Clásico and social media
There are not many rivalries in football (er, soccer) that can compare to that between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. Any game between the two Spanish teams becomes a world-class event and, as such, it also has an important impact on social media and serves as a showcase for numerous brands and sponsors.
For the recent league match between the two clubs, held on November 21st, we created an event to track that media exposure and measure the impact of el Clásico on social networks.
We tracked the official channels of Real Madrid and Barcelona, as well as the channels of the players in both rosters. We also tracked the hashtags #ElClasico, used by FC Barcelona, La Liga and media companies, and #RMClasico, used by Real Madrid. Finally, we took into account all Instagram posts published on Instagram from inside the Santiago Bernabéu stadium.
Engagement
Our tracking was focused on the day of the match, but also on the days before and after the big game. We got 74,986 posts from 38,673 different users. These posts had 124 million engagements, with 31,6 million just the day of the match, roughly twice the engagement of each of the previous days. That engagement fell to 8.6 million on the 22nd.
Our tracking takes into account the following sources:
- posts from official channels (teams and players)
- posts from fans using the official hashtags
- posts from fans at the event location
You can also see that the engagement from fan posts including the official hashtags fades as fans stop using these hashtags.
What about sponsors?
The brands with the most engagement were Qatar Airways, main sponsor for FC Barcelona, with a social engagement valued in nearly €6 million ($6.3M or £4.2M), and Emirates, Real Madrid’s sponsor, with €2.2 million ($2.3M or £1.5M). Nike (€1.9M / $2.1M / £1.4M), Adidas (€896K / $949K / £628K), Beko (€594K / $629K / £416K) and Audi (€178K / $188K / £125K) also achieved significant numbers.
After reviewing these figures it is apparent that El Clásico has a massive presence on social media and that it offers a very valuable visibility to the brands involved in the event. Blinkfire Analytics and our tools can track and measure that visibility, providing teams with more accurate data to negotiate their sponsorship deals and make sure they don’t leave social and digital media out of the equation.
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