Manchester United are celebrating another Facebook milestone, this time passing the 60m fan mark on their page.

Although somewhat behind the likes of former player Cristiano Ronaldo, who recently became the first athlete to pass the 100m mark, and also European rivals FC Barcelona (77m) and Real Madrid (75m).

As part of their 60m celebration they’ve released a video featured Wayne Rooney and Andreas Pereira Vs Juan Mata and Adnan Januzaj taking part in a 60-yard goal shot challenge. The first in a min-series as the two teams take each other on.

But 60m is just a number right? And does it actually mean anything to the club? This is what I put to new Manchester United social media manager, Nick Coppack, and he provided this great reply;

“Yes and no. We’re delighted to have reached this milestone and certainly see it as a significant figure. After all, 60million people is a mind-blowing number. But then, the global appeal of Manchester United is no surprise to us – our pre-season tours take us all around the world and we see first-hand the passion the club inspires.

One of the great advantages of social media is that is allowing us to connect directly to, and engage with these fans. We know all 60million fans won’t be able to make it to Old Trafford to see the team play. But Facebook allows us to bring them closer to the club and communicate with them on a very personal level.

We know the follower figure isn’t everything. Just as important as the headline number is how engaged our fans are. In our minds, content is key and we take pride in tailoring each post to our Facebook audience (you’ll almost never see the same copy on Facebook as you will on any of our other platforms). On an ongoing basis we track and refine the style, tone and approach we take – driven by the feedback and responses we get.

We’ve also developed a set of our own measures that allows us to best encourage interaction in the different stages of our match and seasonal cycles. And we geo-post regularly to countries around the world, in more than 20 different languages. It’s perhaps the things we are doing that most followers don’t see that count the most.

So, while we’re delighted to celebrate reaching 60million fans, we’re continually looking at ways to improve and make our followers’ experience even better.”

There is no doubt the club have made great strides in their use of social media over the past couple of years. We’ve seen their team expand over the last 18 months especially and they’ve consistently been one of the better teams at providing unique content across various platforms.

And Nick is no stranger to the club and their progress on this front either. Having been at the club since 2006 and was, until recently, contributing editor. Now with an expanded role as social media manager, I’m excited (as a fan) to see what they have coming up in the future under his guidance.

Another interesting fact is that their page is the most followed sports page on Facebook by UK users. United have 2.1m local fans whilst their nearest competitors on this are Liverpool and England Football Team with 1.6m.

Although much is said of the potential reach of an international audience and how clubs are concentrating on that (Man United has 650m+ global fans according to survey in 2012). It shows the size of the opportunity just in the UK and that they shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to social media.

You can see by the stats below just how engaged fans have been on Facebook and also the types of content that really gets the fans going (new signings and new kit launches basically). Since the page launch back in February 2012, it has generated;

481 million likes

514 million total interactions (likes, comments, shares)

Most-liked post this season: announcing Angel Di Maria’s arrival. (565k likes)

Most-shared post: “Watch Wayne Rooney reveal the new 2014/15 shirt” (119k shares)