September 16 – With the Champions League group stages kicking off this week, UEFA has released a 1 billion interaction social media stat that makes shows the European club showpiece outperformed all other major events in 2019 by more than 30%.
Quoting online video analytics company Conviva, the European governing body said “the UEFA Champions League final is now the biggest sports event ever on Instagram stories from a single account” with 177 million impressions.
The 1.09 billion social media interactions includes all engagements (likes, shares and comments) and video views, which were 110% higher that the final a year ago. Interactions were tracked across all of UEFA’s social accounts as well as the official accounts of the participating teams, players and various media organisations around the world.
Almost half – 486 million – of the interactions were generated from UEFA’s social media platforms, with the remaining 604 million coming from other sources.
“For years, the UEFA Champions League final has been the biggest one-day sporting event in terms of the media coverage it gets, and the results from the Madrid final corroborate that this is also true on social media,” said UEFA marketing director Guy-Laurent Epstein.
“At UEFA, we actively invest in developing content that ignites interactions and conversations among our fans, the participating clubs, media and our commercial partners. Despite the UEFA Champions League being positioned at the forefront of media and fan engagement, we will continue devoting ourselves to broadening the reach and delivering great content to our fans.”
UEFA said: “The competition itself – from group stage to semi-finals (1 September 2018 to 9 June 2019) – drew over 6.5 billion interactions originating from UEFA’s own social media channels, including 3 billion cross-platform video views.
“The 2019/20 season has also kicked off strongly with 149.5 million interactions generated on UEFA’s owned platforms by content around the group stage draw in Monaco in late August, which is more than four times the amount of interactions compared with last season.”
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