Barça leads social networks for sixth year

FC Barcelona has ended 2020 as the sports club that generated the most engagement on social networks. For the sixth year in a row, it leads the way in likes, comments and shares, with a combined total of 1.6 billion, according to Blinkfire data. In these six years, it has also been the only club that year after year has always had over 1 billion engagements. It’s lead in 2020 is mainly thanks to its leadership on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Tik Tok, where no team tops Barça. Facebook is the only one of the big five networks where Barça is not the number one club.

For the first time in this round-up, Barça is the only club that has over 1.5 billion engagements, and the numbers are still growing, 13.13% up on 2019. This growth is especially impressive considering it all happened in a year marked by Covid-19, where all sports were put on hold for two months, which led to a drop in topical content too. The day when Barça registered its greatest activity this last year was when Messi paid tribute to Maradona at the Camp Nou.

On most platforms, Liverpool (1.485 billion engagements) and Manchester United (1.455) have been Barça’s strongest competitors. That includes Instagram, where FC Barcelona has again generated its greatest number of engagements, 1.282 billion. Its rapid adaptation to new types of content, such the Reels that were launched in 2020, have helped consolidate this leadership, with their short-format videos of relevance to users.

TikTok boom

The same strategy explains the spectacular growth of TikTok, which has been added to this analysis for the first time. Barça is number one for followers on this platform (6.6 million), and also leads for engagement, with 45 million, ahead of Liverpool (35) and Bayern Munich (29). This success has also been reflected on Douyin, the Chinese version of the platform. This year Barça was recognised as The Most Popular Football Club 2020 for its 3.1 million followers and 74 million engagements since launching its official account in January 2019.

In the case of Twitter, only Barça has more than 100 million engagements, (108, to be precise) and remains the undisputed leader. With an increase of 10.2% on 2019, the club’s different accounts on this platform are above Liverpool (87 million) and Manchester United (82). Apart from game coverage and training videos, the use of creative graphic designs has gone down very well with fans.

More subscribers and views than anyone on YouTube

In 2020, Barça became the only club to have more than 10 million YouTube subscribers, the achievement earning it the Diamond Creator Award. The NBA (15.7 million) is the only sports-related account to have more users. This fan loyalty is also reflected in views of videos on the FC Barcelona channel, which amounted to 230 million in 2020, beating Liverpool (228) and Flamengo (225). It should also be noted that Liga teams suffer from a major disadvantage with respect to clubs in other European leagues, which allow publication on this channel of match highlights, one of the most sought-after contents.

While on the subject of video channels, Barça has also made huge advances on Twitch, the fastest growing streaming service. The club only opened its account in December, but managed to attract 467,000 views in the first month.

Apart from engagement data, there has also been growth in terms of followers. In the last 12 months, 30 million new fans have started following Barça’s different accounts on social networks, for an overall total of over 380 million.