Brand Engagement on Facebook: A Comparative Analysis of Three Football Teams' Social Media Pages (Part 1)

Pic from Engadget.com

This study is useful for competitive analysis. I picked the pages of football teams as test subjects because they are active on social media and have highly engaged fan bases.

Data

I used R and FB's Graph API to download data within the date range of Jan. 1, 2017 to Dec. 12, 2017. The file contains 2007 rows and 11 columns. Below is a sample:

The Teams

Manchester United (ManUtd)

I'm a fan of Manchester United and they're historically-speaking the best team in England. They're also the richest sports team according to Forbes. They currently have almost 74m fans.

Real Madrid

Real are the reigning champions of Europe and are known for their habit of buying the biggest stars in world football. They have around 106m fans on Facebook.

Paris St. Germain (PSG)

PSG have been lording over the French league for some years now but has only recently been considered a powerhouse internationally when they signed the third best player in the world. They have around 32m fans on Facebook.

The Charts

Real Madrid and PSG have the most and least FB fans, respectively, so it comes to no surprise that the former have the most number of posts while the latter have the least. What's interesting is that Man Utd come in a close second despite having far less fans than Real.

The three brands mostly used videos to interact with fans. This fact is most apparent on Real Madrid's FB page.

Real Madrid page got the most likes, Man Utd's page is a distant second, and PSG's a dismal third.

In this breakdown, we see that fans clicked "like" mostly on Photo posts. 

Real Madrid's FB fans outshared everybody else's. Let's see what the fans shared in the next chart.

Here's something interesting. Real Madrid fans shared photos more than they did videos. The opposite is true for the other two where video was the preferred media type for sharing.

This is the end of part one. The next installment will contain information about each page's engagement numbers over time, most popular posts, and most influential fans on Facebook in terms of engagement.