European Football Clubs have shown increasing efforts to enter Chinese Social Media and connect with Chinese fans online. This week, Mailman Group released findings to show which teams and footballers have made the most effort to impact their Chinese fans online. The study was conducted over a 7 days period ending on May 1^st and across the top 25 footballers on Sina Weibo, China’s no.1 social network by usage.

Andrew Collins, CEO of Mailman Group, said;

“These results demonstrate that individual footballers’ pages are much more effective than the team pages themselves.  We believe this to be a key area of growth for football clubs, the advantages of launching your top players on Weibo as well as having an official club presence, are overwhelming.”

It’s interesting to see about-to-be-retired Michael Owen being one of the top players in China.  This could be due to his use of social media, which has been very good (if uncontroversial), or equally through his former clubs Liverpool, Real Madrid and Manchester United.  All massive clubs with fans based in every corner of the world.

The inclusion of Nakata shows the Asian influence within the superstar list of those involved in European football.  Much as we in the UK follow the exploits of our players when they head to foreign clubs, and the same can be said about GB athletes in the NBA and NFL.  Chinese fans are going to be interested in the voice of a ‘local’ (Nakata being Japanese of course) who is plying his trade far from home.

It’s fair to say that there is a long way to go for European clubs in this market, an untapped market.  Liverpool have been one of the pioneers from a club perspective with Man City, Real Madrid, Barcelona and the other powerhouses not far behind.  It will be interesting to see if Manchester United step up their efforts in this region (I’m sure there are plans afoot).

From a player perspective, those who take their ‘brand’ seriously will exploit their popularity from tours and the club they play for.  For others, getting to grips with Facebook and Twitter is proving challenge enough!

Key insights of this study include:

–       The top 3 players on Sina Weibo play for Spain’s La Liga and have alltogether 29M+ total followers.

–       LaLiga players dominate Sina Weibo, with 8 times more followers than the English Premier League players

–       Player-celeb Gareth Bale’s fan numbers and engagement skyrocketed after he won English Premier League’s Player of the Year and the Young Player Awards.