A short while ago – 25 days to be exact – I wrote a post about European football clubs’ use of Facebook as an online platform. Upon completion of the post I realized that during the time I had been typing FC Barcelona had increased its fan base on Facebook with several hundreds of new fans.
I decided to give it a little time and check this growth again at a later stage – so here are today’s numbers for the top three clubs [on Facebook] in Europe:
- FC Barcelona: 2,146,011
- Real Madrid: 1,704,918
- Liverpool FC: 1,461,115
Conclusion: over the past 25 days the FC Barcelona Facebook page has grown by 223,000 fans - or close to 9,000 fans EVERY single day. Acknowledging that the past month has been slightly unique for the club (i.e. winning the championship), let us have a look at the other clubs on the list and see how many fans were added to their Facebook pages on a daily basis:
- Real Madrid: 8,489
- Liverpool: 4,358
These numbers are staggering – in particular when looking beyond the 25 days included in this “analysis”. It clearly shows that there is GREAT momentum to gain on networks like Facebook (and shortly I would expect many more European clubs to be showing strong numbers on Twitter) and that clubs understanding and taking advantage of these tools will be able to grow and develop their fan relations faster and better than other clubs.
No other single marketing initiative can match the growth seen within social media [try to do the math in relation to how many fans the numbers above would calculate into on a yearly basis] and it will be interesting to follow how different clubs, players and leagues pick up on this.
9,000 “new” fans EVERY day is simply a fact that will not go unnoticed 
