Why Argentine clubs love Instagram and who has the most interactions

Football fans love Instagram and football clubs, much more. There is no doubt that one love corresponds to the other: the highest numbers of interactions of social media posts related to football events are found on Instagram , the best impact rate between posts and reactions. In Argentine soccer, the difference between the platforms is abysmal. The same thing happens globally. The illustration about Argentina Champion of Qatar 2022 published by FIFA on December 18 had more than 6 million likes, a record for an international sports federation.

In the monthly report that Liga Profesional de Fútbol offers on the clubs’ social networks, Instagram emerges as the leading platform for communication with fans. With data from February, Instagram accumulates 55 million club interactions with their fans, while Twitter adds five million, Facebook 4.2, TikTok 3.1 and YouTube barely 63 thousand. But when it comes to analyzing how first division clubs distribute their posts, Twitter accounts for 53 percent of all posts, Facebook 23 percent, Instagram 20 percent, YouTube 3 percent and TikTok 1 percent.

River Plate is the club that gets the most interactions in Argentine soccer: 25.2 million. And the influence of Instagram in that figure is overwhelming: 21.4 million interactions are achieved on that platform. That is, almost 90 percent of the total engagement. Boca is second with 18.2 million interactions and 15.6 million correspond to Instagram: way to 90 percent of the total. Curiously, River and Boca made the same number of posts on social networks during February: 637 publications.

Neither Boca nor River are the clubs that made the most publications: River is tenth in the general table and Boca eleventh. The leader in total postings was Instituto with 1,261, followed by Rosario Central with 810.

Instagram and TikTok, platforms that go for the same loot, are two cases that show how the number of posts has no direct influence on the interaction with fans. Less can be more. The truth is that TikTok still appears at the end of this queue, although its growth is perceived from one month to the next.

YouTube has not yet found exploitation commensurate with its potential by clubs, being today the dominant global video platform that concentrates live broadcasts, highlights, short videos, reactions and content production that, at first glance, equals the traditional media with independent content creators who are located outside of large structures.

For football clubs, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are platforms where the generation of content and a certain institutionality -even if it is informal- continue to be relevant in terms of authorship. TikTok, on the other hand, bases its growth on the entertainingness of the video, its ability to go viral and regardless of where the origin and original signature of that content was. Argentine soccer still prefers publications with first and last names, which preserve the identity and relationship between fans and their colors.

In that context, Instagram wins by far.

Conocé The Trust Project