This is the second part of our series of guest articles by Aleksandr Grudnev, a researcher and SMM specialist in sport in the build-up to the 2018 World Cup in Russia. This time, we’re looking at social media of Russian national football team: the platforms, type of content and fan reactions are all in focus.

Social Media Mix

Football has one of the best social media presences of any sport in Russia. All of the Russian national football teams (men and women, adult and youth) are fully represented on different platforms, though the accounts are not equally developed. On Instagram they have around 101k subscribers, Twitter 676k and Facebook 79k, while Odnoklassniki and VK (which are Russian social media platforms) have only 18k and 13k, respectively. A YouTube channel named Russian Football Union TV (RFS TV in Russian) has a very small number of subscribers, 5.8k.

Of course, the number of followers is only one small criteria to measure the success of Russian football on social media, but the numbers are given here more for general information. Most of the exclusive content has been published on Instagram and VK, where the SMM specialists do live-streams from pre-game ceremonies, press-conferences and training sessions.

The content

The content around the platforms is usually the same: images of players, interviews, summaries and sometimes even the whole games (Russia – Spain was streamed live on VK). And in addition, there are birthday wishes and contests for fans as well as historical reviews of the past games. For example, one video tells about the Spanish players in Soviet football and their lives, another one highlights the best moments from the football game between the supporters of the both countries.

RFS TV regularly publishes videos of good quality. Video interviews, “Behind the scenes” reports, the facts about rivals and even content related to social events. The friendly game against Spain occurred on the World Diabetes Day (14th November) and the TV team produced a short video with the players for this occasion. The video was spread around social media platforms and had many views, on VK alone it had more than 371k views, which is great looking back at the number of followers on this platform. The initiative was well-received by the fans.

On the last friendly games RFS started video blogging as well, which looks modern and cool. In the first episode a young man spoke to supporters in front of the stadium before the game. He was asking for the game predictions, solution of Ronaldo-Messi dilemma and the ways to stop the Argentinian number ten. A six-minute video became lively and funny, and was based on the entertainment with the fans.

To sum up, the video content could be ranked as the first for the Russian national football team’s promoters. This content is lively, diverse and interesting. People watch, like and share it. It seems that content managers do not see any sense to put more effort into design, creative stories’ ideas or amazing texts.
Other features of social media accounts are swept under the carpet.

The uniqueness of the national team gave it the special interest and simple delivery across all six platforms could do a good job of promoting games – the rest is done by the die-hard fans, e. g. the amateur VK group of Russian football team has around 178k members, which is 13 times more than the official one. And it significantly multiplies all the efforts of RFS promoters put in.

Look out for part two of this look at the Russian National Team’s approach to social media next week

Alex is a graduate of the Russian International Olympic University, a volunteer of two Olympic Games, and a big football fan who has been working in football industry since 2014 as reporter and writer. This year he worked as a venue manager in hospitality area at the Confederations Cup in Russia