It may feel a bit strange to see the number of Facebook followers of FC Barcelona (38M) is lower than Messi’s (40M). The same happens with Real Madrid‘s number of Facebook fans (34M) comparing with Cristiano Ronaldo (52M). Personal brands have been understood as fundamental weapons to leverage a club’s brand. This has been particularly agreed and adopted since the year 2000, when Florentino Perez won Real Madrid’s presidency for the first time with the promise of creating a team of “Galacticos”.

At a first sight, it may well look like the individual player is greater than the club but, in what comes to sports marketing and social media, it may very well be this way.

Many world-wide fans follow and support their clubs in their own national leagues, complementing it with the tendency of following one or two world-class players of their liking. One needs only look to Asia (the commercial and marketing success of Park Ji-Sung in the UK or Nakata in Italy have become classic case-studies in sports marketing Universities) and look at how European players are being keenly followed away from home – David Beckham or Robbie Keane being a good example for LA Galaxy.

In Portugal, it has been curious to observe the market’s preferences in the past decade: TV shares of Manchester United and Chelsea were incredibly high when Ronaldo and Mourinho were starring in the Premier League. Now, Real Madrid seem to be every Portuguese fan’s second club: after Benfica, FC Porto and Sporting Lisbon, Real Madrid’s matches have the biggest TV-shares. Why? Because they have Portuguese personal stars: Mourinho and Ronaldo.

Top European clubs have understood this tendency and take advantage of the online world, namely social media sites, to promote their stars and help develop their own communication channels. Indeed, these channels will lead to more awareness and engagement, both with the players and the club.

It basically means what firms and advertisers are looking forward to hear: “more audience”. More audience will eventually be reflected on the club’s direct sales – shirts, merchandise – and indirect sales such as new sponsorship agreements and TV broadcasting rights.

It’s a win-win situation that definitely proves one thing: social media is continuously changing the game.

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Ronaldo, who is rated as the 5th most marketable athlete in the world, has a Facebook Page growth of 1.6 million new Likes every month – more than a million more than Leo Messi’s growth.

At just 27, Ronaldo has a larger Facebook presence than the likes of Justin Bieber, Disney, Red Bull, Starbucks and even his own club Real Madrid. Ronaldo dwarves former Real Madrid star David Beckham who has just a measly 21 million – yeah, measly!

Does this mean anything though?

Many may state that whilst this is an impressive feat, what does it actually mean in terms of commercial value? Having such a massive Facebook value can definitely be used for financial gain. For example, Ronaldo commands a large percentage of Facebook users – this data, access and voice is invaluable to a brand who might want to sponsor Ronaldo. Therefore, Ronaldo should be using this as justification to command higher sponsorship fees.

Furthermore, life after football is always at the back of every players mind and with such a huge activated audience listening to every word – Ronaldo has essentially set himself up a platform to become his own publisher/media. Even when he is no longer playing, his opinion will be noticed and he will constantly be in the spotlight – thereby opening the doors to potential press opportunities. Above all else, Ronaldo – as many athletes have – can use it as a marketing platform to promote merchandise, books and clothing – thereby exploiting their fans for financial gain.

Of course – all the above isn’t possible without authentic social media engagement, so athletes should make sure that they don’t merely treat their fans as customers. Athletes need to be smarter – listen, engage and react when they are playing in order to develop those relationships as soon as possible.

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According to the very excellent Football Social Media metric site – folos.im, there are currently a total of  28,707,607 Twitter followers across 1197 teams worldwide.

Football Social Media has quickly become a primary channel for fans to find out the very latest about their club, the transfer market and live game commentary. It has also opened up a new wealth of insight into the lifestyle and daily routine of a professional footballer – what they eat, music they listen to and even their political ideology.

For clubs, Social Media is a new gateway to engage with their fans both domestically and abroad. As a marketing and engagement channel, Social Media is always switched on and always active. Clubs can tap into these communities for market research, product testing, sentiment analysis and even crowdsourcing new opportunities. Football Social Media creates more site traffic, new revenues for merchandise and above all – a better relationship between club and customer.

But just because it’s clear that the fans want more from Social Media, it doesn’t mean that clubs should “jump in” without a strategy. If clubs set up a Twitter account without any real investment or purpose behind it, then they can expect failure. Sure, they might pick up a few thousand followers and get RT’d a lot on the back of their brand, but they will fail in that they’ve missed a massive opportunity.

Football clubs needs to embrace Social Media with a strategic and long-term approach:

• PURPOSE: What are you going to use Social Media for? Answering customer service enquiries? Fan engagement? Generate matchday sales? Promote site content? Brand reputation?

• PEOPLE: Who is your Social Media for? What age are they? What channels do they use? What are their passion points? Are your fans even on Social Media?

• PLATFORM: What channels work best? Where do you fans interact online? Message boards? Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? Google+?

• PERFORMANCE: How will you do it? Now you understand your audience and purpose, what’s the best way to reach your goals? What content will work best for you? How will you measure success?

These are just a few of the questions clubs should be asking. They’re not revolutionary, nor are they complicated, but with a little time and effort around these elements football clubs can reap huge rewards.

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Kaka’s popularity on Twitter is most likely down to the fact that he personally updates and creates content for his followers as supposed to hiring in external community managers. A modest and shy footballer, Kaka puts a lot of effort into engaging directly with his fans.

Furthermore, Kaka uses a multi-platform approach to his social media, meaning, rather than just posting exclusively on the one social network he cross promotes his Twitter content on Facebook, Facebook on Twitter and even more impressively his Instagram profile.

Instagram, the subject of a 1 billion acquisition from Facebook this month, is still unknown to most in the football industry. However, that hasn’t stopped Kaka from using the photo sharing app to accumulate over 134k Instagram followers.

Since this blog first started in December 2010, there has been a huge growth in Football Social Media and this landmark goes to show how close the game and digital communications has grown in such a short amount of time. As sports fans continue to flock to social media sites in order to follow their sporting heroes, players and clubs must pay more attention and think strategically about their online activity.

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• • Allow fans to share their game-day experiences with the thousands of supporters at the Santiago Bernabéu, and with millions more around the globe, via social media applications easily accessible from their mobile devices.

• • Provide customised applications that create an immersive and interactive game-day environment, allowing fans to use their smartphones to engage Real Madrid in a more personalized fashion.

• • Help ensure consistent and reliable connectivity to thousands of fans by efficiently off-loading all data traffic and freeing up the entire cellular network bandwidth for phone calls and text messages.

• • Provide a new communication channel which Real Madrid staff will be able to use for security and operational purposes and other services, including a better service to the press and other media.

• • In addition to this, there’s a whole spectrum of new possibilities to access content and engage with visitors during non-gaming days, especially for the Bernabéu stadium visiting tours.

I’ve blogged at great length about the importance of improving connectivity in football stadiums, it is entirely pointless to spend thousands on a Social Media strategy and content if you don’t improve the location where this will be most relevant. Fans need to have access to WiFi or 3G if they are to talk about the sport, share content and sign up with your Social Media channels.

Real Madrid are the second team in Europe to optimise their stadium in order facilitate and encourage Social Media usage, the first being their La Liga rivals and Social Media powerhouse – FC Barcelona – who improved the Camp Nou in July. Hopefully, this kind of thinking comes to the UK sharpish as football fans are consistently frustrated by a lack of mobile connectivity during matchdays. I’m also delighted to see a second club fulfil my original prediction that we’d see Socially Connected Stadiums by 2012.

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