Social media and football

Many people in the world are using Twitter as their daily social network. And Twitter grows bigger and bigger every day. So new opportunities for football clubs and players to use it.

A lot of football players are twittering nowadays. Some send positive reactions into the media world and some negative. The most popular twitters in the UK are for instance, Ferdinand and Rooney from Manchester United. Everything they twitter about  their followers find it interesting and talk about or the media writes or publish it. With these kind of attention the player and the club get a lot of free publicity. For example when FC Barcelona player Lionel Messi twittered about his new Adidas shoes, the next day the Adidas shoe got a lot of attention in the media and Adidas saw that their shoe was selling out.

Twitter can also bring a player negative attention like Aston Villa’s Darren Bent used his page to vent his frustrations at a hold up in his move to Sunderland, he cursed words. He apologized to his then employers and even closed his Twitter page at one point during his time with Sunderland to concentrate on his football. So the social media is becoming a new hype for football players and also football clubs who twitter or are on Facebook. In the chart below you can that FC Barcelona has the most followers on twitter and Facebook. FC Barcelona even overtook the NBA basketball last year so not are they leader in the social media for football but also for all sports in the world.

The chart presented below show the number of Twitter followers and Facebook likes for each club. The teams are ranked by their combined number of fans across the two sites. The chart only tracked the sites and accounts identified as official. Many clubs and players have a lot of unofficial Facebook and Twitter accounts but only official sites were monitored.

RANK	TEAM		FACEBOOK	TWITTER	TOTAL	MONTH +/-
1		FC Barcelona	23,359,311	2,316,765	25,676,076	+ 1,485,019
2		Real Madrid	22,182,985	2,872,018	25,055,003	+ 1,197,582
3		Manchester United	20,269,260	0	20,269,260	+ 220,561
4		Arsenal	8,155,842	1,061,636	9,217,478	+ 285,794
5		Chelsea	7,885,970	501,375	8,387,345	+ 312,061
6		Liverpool	7,598,225	583,482	8,181,707	+ 248,282
7 (+1)		AC Milan	6,996,455	242,681	7,239,136	+ 460,542