The value and importance of Social Media in sport continues to grow. It’s a great way to send information and connect with fans of a particular team or league. However, for teams, there’s another way that social media is important and that’s providing more exposure to their sponsors.
According to Nielsen data, at the halfway point of the European 2017/18 season, the kit provider of the top 40 soccer teams have received over 80 billion impressions across social media channels. This equates to about $70.6 million in quality index media value. Of that $71 million in media value, two brands owned the lion’s share of value equating to about 89% of those total impressions
What’s interesting to note is that Instagram largely drove the interaction for these teams’ jersey content. By the midway point, this season there had been over 630 million interactions alone with content sporting Brand A. The level of interactions across platform followed by Facebook, Twitter and finally YouTube. For the brand marketer, it may be important to note these numbers when considering social media activation.
Lastly, these valuations and sponsorship assets within social media allow us to value other more traditional assets and how they may be lacking in overall exposure compared to social media. Out of the entire assets tracked by Social24, they found that the jersey provides the most exposure for the jersey provider. 38% to 54% of the total impressions come from jersey specific content which is second only to the value of game-related content such as highlights & match photos. As values of Soccer teams continue to increase, it’ll be interesting to view whether kit providers step away from more traditional sponsorship assets and throw far more money into social media content.
Categories: Digital Content, Social Media, Sponsorship, YouTube