Who has more followers among Serie A's clubs?
IQUII Sports has counted every social follower of italian and european clubs
In the contemporary football scenario, social networks are pivotal assets for clubs. We have already talked about the branding and image problem of Serie A and its club, and we highlighted that an important part of that was the lack of online presence on social networks. Few clubs seem to have a coherent and efficient social strategy that matches the aesthetic standards of our time: if you take a quick tour on the Instagram profile of various team it will be crystal clear about the taste and the scarce number of followers, that is ulòtimately the most important metric to measure the online presence of a club. The private company IQUII Sports has released a report about Serie A's and European clubs that count the number of followers on the three main social media channel: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Let's have a look.
Serie A
Juventus and Milan guide the Serie A ranking with 43,2 and 34,3 million of followers (it's the sum of the three social networks' audiences). After a big gap of nearly 20 million, Roma is on the third place with 11,5, followed by Inter and Napoli that are still under 10 million. As in the real ranking of Serie A, the last two teams are Spal and Benevento that are both under the 100K followers, a ridiculous result for a professional Serie A's team. From a quality point of view, the majority of the accounts are almost amatorial, for instance, Crotone's Instagram is not even "official". In addition, just the top teams use English or other alphabets: a borderline case is the Napoli's official twitter, that should take reps of English classes. In the last slide, it is possible to look at the social exposure that the brands benefit from the club's social account: adidas is dominating the scene because of Juventus and Milan, from next season the brand will leave the Rossoneri and the whole system will be more balanced.
The European scenario
The delay of Italian clubs in the digital environment becomes even clearer when you look at the European competitors. Barcellona and Real Madrid lead the ranking with astronomic numbers (185 and 180 million of followers), followed by Manchester United the most valuable brand in football. Under the roof of 100 million, there are Arsenal, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and PSG. The first Italian team is Juventus in the 9th position. The fact that also Liverpool - which won its last trophy in 2006, when Instagram wasn't even in the mind of their founders - is above Juventus - the club that ruled Italy for the last 7 years - says it all.
