Lots of articles, blog posts, comments and tweets are published daily covering the topic of sports marketing. Overflow of information, being able to filter the good from the bad or even just remembering what one has read, heard or seen, seem to be an ongoing challenge.

At the beginning of each year there is a piece put together by Tomas Janca, the latest one being “10 Sports Marketing Trends for 2012” which I can only recommend everyone to check out. Should you already have viewed it earlier, I can only encourage you to take a look at it again. I personally just had another look through and and it (once again) made me think and reflect over the various trends and how they are developing and being implemented.

The reason for promoting this particular piece is not only that it gives a good overview of current trends within sports marketing but also because it in several ways differs from other articles, presentations and videos on this subject:

• It is short, concrete (incl. cases for each trend) and to the point
• It is GLOBAL – there is nothing worse than reading “trend” stories focusing on one country/continent or one sport
• The author revisits his statements from the previous year and doesn’t overrate his ability to predict the future. Tomas Janca “simply” puts a great list of trends together in one piece backed up by facts, figures and cases

The presentation can be found below. I wonder what your view on the trends are? Is this a complete list? Which are just passing trends vs. must haves? Which trend will have the biggest impact in 2012? Which sports/clubs are leading? What is in store for 2013?

In the fall of 2010 a blog post here at Loyalsticity introduced the concept “Social Media Fanbase Penetration” (SMFP) in an attempt to move the focus away from volumes (e.g. number of Facebook friends) and look into what proportion of a club’s actual fanbase a club connects with via social media. SMFP was introduced as an attempt to provide a better comparison measure for social media fan reach as a club like Napoli for example will never reach the same volumes as Real Madrid.

This past week has seen numerous of new articles published (for example on the UK Sports Network and Fotebol Finance) focusing on ranking football clubs by number of Facebook friends and although newsworthy, I believe it is time to take another look at SMFP and see how clubs do in relation to their actual fan bases?

Below are the top European football clubs in terms of European fan bases – and their respective SMFPs:

FC Barcelona: 25%
Real Madrid: 42%
Manchester United: 42%
Chelsea: 24%

[explanation: The SMFP number for FC Barcelona means that the club is connected with 25% of their total fan base via Facebook]

Whereas Real Madrid was leading amongst the top four clubs in Europe in the analysis done in 2010, it is now clear that Manchester United have gained significant ground when it comes to connecting with fans via social media. Looking further down the list, clubs such as Liverpool, Arsenal and AC Milan are now sitting above 20% as well.

Social media is also picking up with the German clubs but as is the case with for example Italian clubs (AC Milan being the exception), there is still quite some way to go and most clubs sit well below a 10% SMFP score. Looking at the major clubs in Eastern Europe who also make it to Sport+Markt Top 20 list, it is evident (even if including numbers from Russia’s biggest social network site VKontakte) that social media still has lots of potential. As comments on the blog post in 2010 indicated, it should be noted that both factors in the hand of clubs (e.g. focus on social media, mobile marketing) as well as external factors (e.g. adoption of IT, internet penetration) contribute to the differences. Nevertheless, looking at what SMFP scores that can be achieved it is clear that most clubs still have great potential “waiting” for them on social networks.

In the beginning of this article Real Madrid and Manchester United were credited with +40% SMFP scores but that is still nothing compared to the following club:

In first place, sitting at a staggering 78% is Galatasaray – followed by city rival Fenerbahce (64%). Galatasaray was the number 1 club on Facebook in volume until August of 2010 and although growth numbers have been much lower than the bigger European clubs, the club has continued to grow its social media involvement and has a very lively and engagement focused Facebook page.

In a few months time we will take another look at SMFP rankings. In the meantime, however, the search will go on to see if better statistics for fan base sizes can be found. As mentioned in the earlier article the number of fans used in this article are based on European figures – as worldwide figures don’t seem to exist for all clubs or are not reliable. Should anyone know of good worldwide statistics showing number of fans, please drop me a note. If anyone even has better European numbers, these will be greatly appreciated – I personally think that some of the clubs mentioned above have many more fans than what they have been assigned.

Until then Galatasaray can enjoy their #1 position in Social Media Fanbase Penetration.

*SMFP is defined as the ratio between likes on Facebook and the fan base of the club. The source used for fan base sizes is Sport+Markt’s recent and highly interesting “Football Top 20 2010″

Today was the day that Lionel Messi launched his official Facebook page. Numerous sites around the world (incl. Mashable) have been busy publishing stories around how Messi has been able to gather almost 7 million friends in just one day!

Although Messi is the best football player on the planet at the moment and his club just took a big step towards the Champions League semi-final, it seems like things have been blown out of proportion in regards to the almost 7 million fans.

Let us take a closer look at the numbers. It is now approximately 12 hours ago since the launch occured. Messi at the moment has 6.77 million “likes”, which would mean that 9,400 people would have clicked on “like” each and every minute the last 12 hours! To make the story even better, Messi already had 6.66 million likes at 2PM (Central European Time) today, which would mean that 22,200 people each and every minute would have become fan in the first hours after the launch (assuming the page was launched at 9AM).

Getting back to reality; the starting number for the Lionel Messi page was already well above the 6 million when it was launched this morning (through people signing up on an unofficial page in the past months). A more realistic growth number on this first day of the official Messi page is 200,000-300,000 which is certainly still an impressive number – although not as interesting a story as one with 6 or 7 million in it!

What has been done very well around the whole launch, however, is the hype that has been created. This has lead to thousands of tweets and articles about the 6-7 million fans in one day. The launch has thus not only reached Messi fans but also sparked additional interest due to its sheer volume. This way the news – and Messi – has made it into regions, onto sites and its way to readers who may not even be big Messi fans in the first place.

What do you think? Great marketing stunt, social media experts uncritically writing news stories or?