By Paul Nicholson
April 4 – A survey of social media activity of international sports governing bodies has ranked FIFA as the best performing international federation (IF) across all platforms. The survey last year ranked FIFA in 10th place.
The annual #SportOnSocial is produced by the Red Torch digital agency and ranks all 35 Olympic International Federations.
FIFA’s move to the top of the ranking was driven by huge engagement around the World Cup in Russia.
Breaking down the numbers by social media platform, FIFA rose 15 places to third place on Facebook with the opening weekend of the World Cup generating more new followers than any other period; the Final produced the highest engagement rate, says the report.
Video content from previous FIFA World Cup tournaments produced more comments than any other post on The World Cup Facebook page. The top two posts by comments on the main FIFA page were a #FridayFeeling post and a friendship celebration post on New Year’s Eve.
Looking at the content posted and the engagement, the report finds: “44% of Facebook content were videos (22k), 40% of which were owned videos and received 723.2m views; all other video content generated an additional 182.2m video views. On average, IFs got 23k views per video; FIFA over-indexed by 6.3x.”
“Owned video content produced the highest engagement rate, 1.9x higher than the Facebook average. 38% of content were photos; however, this was as high as 69% for some IFs including FIFA.”
The average number of Facebook posts is not huge, averaging 2.3 posts per day, while 84% of engagements were reactions rather than genuine comment (Like, Love, Wow, Sad, Angry and Haha). 38% of content were videos with a 0.6% average engagement rate.
It was on Instagram where FIFA posts really dominated, seeing a doubling of their follower count to 12.4 million (12x more followers than the 2nd highest IF). FIFA had the top 100 posts by engagement, with an average of five hashtags per post.
Three of the highest posts by engagements came from paid partnerships with Budweiser, which presented Man of the Match awards during the World Cup, and FIFA made the most of star players including Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.
Toxic Twitter
Twitter was generally disregarded by all federations and perhaps not surprisingly as the platform has become something of a toxic and dangerous platform for original sports content following a Twitter purge locking accounts that detected sudden changes in account behaviour.
On average, IFs underwent a 1% decline in Twitter followers, a reflection of their lack of engagement with the platform.
YouTube power
FIFA also topped the YouTube performance ranking with a growth of 5.4 million fans, 81% of them coming during the World Cup. 89% of video views (985.8 million) came during the tournament.
See the full report at https://www.redtorch.co/sportonsocial-2019/
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