FC Barcelona becomes first sports club to reach over a billion views on Instagram Reels

FC Barcelona is the first sports club or competition in the world to get over 1 billion views on Instagram Reels, the short, vertical form videos that the platform launched in August 2020. It is a milestone that reinforces the club’s leadership in the digital realm, both in terms of the number of followers (over 375 million) and the engagement generated on social networks. In 2020, the club’s Instagram account, which is on the point of reaching 96 million followers, topped the industry with its 1.282 billion likes, comments and shares.

Barça is fully committed to making Instagram Reels part of its content strategy, attracted by how easily it can be used to reach out to younger audiences and its potential to generate viral video clips, which can be attributed to the possibilities that the format offers for focusing on specific moments, such as behind the scenes footage, training skills and items posted by other Barça fans around the world. These contents are more informal, where spontaneity, challenges, animations, and the integration of music all play their part in offering experiences that are better adapted to young people’s tastes.

The ceiling of 1 billion views is particularly noteworthy considering that FC Barcelona does not hold audio-visual rights to LaLiga and therefore cannot include images from games in its reels. This is in stark contrast to clubs in the Premier League, Bundesliga and Serie A, and in other competitions around the world like the NBA.

But aside from the symbolic achievement of a billion views, this is clear evidence of the value of the Barça brand and the love and affinity for the Club among youth populations, who are the main user base of this format, and reveals a great performance among Culers around the world.

In this context, for the sixth year in a row, FC Barcelona has ended the calendar year as the sports club that has generated the most engagement in the world on its social media, a total of 1,603 million.

This has also happened as a result of Barça’s commitment to putting its fans at the centre of everything it does, creating contents that are adapted to different social networks, languages and audiences in different parts of the world.