Title
Football clubs in the digital era:
the key role of direct fan engagement and brand image
for a successful Facebook strategy
A comparison between clubs with a different fan base dimension
Andrea Spaziani
Student number 10969756
Master's programme Communication Science
Corporate Communication
2
Abstract
The rise and wide diffusion of social media applications allow sports organizations to directly communicate with fans, capitalising on their emotional involvement with teams and establishing mutually beneficial relationships. Despite the large body of research devoting attention to sport clubs and social media, very few studies exists on how professional football clubs make use of Facebook, the most popular social medium worldwide.
Drawing on the existing literature on public relations, marketing communication and brand image literature, this study primarily aims at investigating the difference between top and regular club in using this tool, by means of a large content analysis of the official pages of eight Italian and Spanish clubs.
In line with my expectations, results revealed that top clubs try to directly involve fans through Facebook communication significantly more than regular clubs; they are also more committed to manage their overall brand image by this social media, while smaller clubs stick to the communication of information almost exclusively related to team's games and players. The study contribute as well to provide practical implications for clubs: in order to boost fans' engagement, they are advised to seek for direct fans involvement in the communication process and to privilege post containing visual forms of communication, preferably images.
Keywords: direct fan involvement, brand equity, brand image, engagement
Andrea Spaziani Univerisity of Amsterdam Master Thesis in Corporate Communication
3
Introduction
The emergence and rapid spread of social media platforms provided sport organizations with a new line of communication with fans (Williams & Chinn, 2010). The importance of this new avenue cannot be underestimated, both as interaction has been identified as a crucial element of the relationship marketing process (Grönroos, 2004) and because of the special nature that characterize the connection between fans and clubs. Compared to regular consumers and casual spectators, in fact, sport fans are more prone to look for information about their team and players (Tapp & Clowes, 2002). Due to the enthusiastic involvement shown by them, social networking sites (sns) like Facebook seem very suitable to establish a mutually beneficial relationship (Bühler & Nufer, 2009) and to create additional and valuable experiences within and outside the regular sport consumption (Williams & Chinn, 2010).
Since football is the most popular and followed sport in Europe (Giulianotti, 2012) and researchers, media and analysts often refer to professional football clubs as brands, (Bridgewater, 2010) the present study aims at exploring how those clubs make use of Facebook, the social media most widely used worldwide. A large body of literature has devoted attention to sports organizations and social media in the American context (see Starvos, Meng, Westberg &Farrelly, 2012; Waters, Burke, Jackson & Buning, 2011 amongst others), while researches concerning European football have often limited their investigation to English Premier League clubs (see McCarthy, Rowley, Ashworth & Pioch, 2014; Brand & Klein, 2012). However, only few researches have focused on the overall communication activity of European professional clubs on Facebook, on the extent to which they try to establish a direct communication with fans, and on the effect of different topics and types of content in driving users’ engagement. By means of an unprecedented content analysis of Italian and Spanish football clubs' Facebook pages, this research aims to fill this gap in the existing literature sheding a light on the topics and the post typologies on which their communication is based, on the efforts made by teams to directly involve fans in the communication process, also giving indications about the public response through the inclusion of measure of engagement. A key feature and added value of the study is the comparison between top clubs (those with more than one million fans on Facebook) and regular clubs (those followed by less than one million fans). This novel aspect will allow to verify if clubs of diverse fan base dimensions substantially differ in the use of a popular social media platform like Facebook. Lastly, building on Brand and Klein's (2012) work on football clubs and brand image, this paper also aims to provide insights on the attributes on which club's communication is more focused: the fact that they are hinged on the actual product
4 (games and players) or on other aspects concerning the team and the fans, but not directly concerning the sport performance, will give important indications about the underlying communication and brand image strategies chosen by top and regular clubs.
Theoretical Framework
Social Media
The growing relevance of social media platforms in the last few years produced a significant impact on people's everyday life and in almost every area of human communication, a phenomenon of such magnitude that many scholars in different research fields spoke of "Social Media revolution" (Hutter, Hautz, Dennhardt, & Füller, 2013; Herrera, 2014; Dubose, 2011). This claim is corroborated by the report produced annually by We Are
Social in partnership with Global Web Index, one of the most reliable sources of social media
statistics: accordingly with their latest update (as reported by Chaffey, 2016), nowadays there are 2.307 billion of active social media users, which corresponds to 31% of the world's total population. Compared with the previous year, in 2016 there has been an increase of 10% (219 million) of active users. To give an even clearer picture of the striking penetration of these new tools, we should consider that ten years ago in the United States only 7% of the population used one or more social networking sites, while today that figure increased substantially, reaching 65% of US population (Chaffey, 2016).
Before focusing on the impact and effects of social media on organizations, and football clubs in particular, it seems important to underline the features that define them. In their pioneering study, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), defined Social Media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content". This definition clearly highlights the two fundamental building blocks on which Social Media are founded: on the one hand, accordingly to the authors, Web 2.0 can be considered as the platform for the evolution of Social Media, due to the fact that it allows the users to continuously modify the content in a participatory and collaborative fashion. On the other hand, User Generated Content (UGC) can be seen as "the sum of all the ways in which people make use of social media" (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). More specifically, UGC are produced by users who put a "certain amount of creative effort" to produce a content which is "created outside of professional routines and platforms" and published either on a "publicly accessible website or on a social networking site" (OECD, 2007).
5 social media have to be considered as a general category, within which it is necessary to distinguish different types of applications on the basis of their positioning on four different dimensions, namely: self-presentation, self-disclosure, social presence and media richness1. Table 1 clearly illustrates the different types of social media derived from this typology.
Social presence/ Media richness
Low Medium High
Self-presentation/ Self-disclosure
High Blogs Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook)
Virtual social worlds (e.g., Second Life) Low Collaborative projects
(e.g., Wikipedia)
Content communities (e.g., YouTube)
Virtual game worlds (e.g., World of
Warcraft)
Table 1: Classification of Social Media by social presence/media richness and self-presentation/self-disclosure
(Source: Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
Among the six categories derived, the present work focuses on social networking sites (SNS), which have been defined as "web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system" (Ellison, 2007). As emerges from this definition, SNS allow individuals to present themselves by means of a profile and to articulate their social networks, also making them visible to others. Social networking sites significantly differ from traditional websites in the way in which their communities are organized: while on the latter communities were built and structured around interests, on social networks they are organized around people, with the individual at the centre of their own community (Ellison, 2007). This shift mirrors the unmediated social structure of SNS, where ‘‘the world is composed of networks, not groups’’ (Wellman, 1988, p. 37).
The social networking site that this study aims to explore and to take into account as the media environment where professional football clubs communicate is Facebook. Created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, this website was originally designed to connect Harvard University's students. For several years, Facebook is now the most popular social medium in the world (Duggan et al., 2014), and according to the latest available figures, updated to April 2016, it counts on 1.59 billion active users ("Leading social networks", 2016). The reason why this tool is perfectly suited for the goals of this present research is that Facebook offers not only a space for users, but also for brands and organizations. As claimed by Slattery, McHardy and Bairathi (2013), the Facebook Page Network provides a public space where brands, public figures and organizations can efficiently manage their social presence and
1 For more information on this classification scheme, see Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the
6 develop their digital public relations and first and foremost connect with their online audience, that through the official page can receive uploads and display affiliation and affinity with a particular brand or organization. This kind of relationship is established in a unidirectional manner: when the users start following the organization on the social network, they create a number of ties that on Facebook are labelled as "Fans" (Ellison, 2007). Despite this connection is activated one-sidedly, it is crucial for brands and organization to manage their online relationships on Facebook and other social networking sites in a bi-directional manner, placing great importance on the public, its feedbacks and opinions, as pointed out in the next section.
Brands and Organizations on Social Media
Public Relations
For any organization it is crucial to establish positive relationships with the external environment, so that the public relations function, defined by Grunig and Hunt (1984) as "the management of communication between an organization and its public", represents one of the core activities for companies operating in any field. To manage this function, the two scholars identified four models, distinguishing them on the basis of their one-way or two-way nature. The press agentry and the public information models are founded on a one-way approach, based on a top-down dissemination of information, from the organization to public. On the two-way side, the authors placed the two-way asymmetrical and the two-way symmetrical models: while in the first one persuasion and manipulation are used to influence audience to behave as the organization desires, in the symmetrical one communication is used to negotiate with stakeholders and public (Grunig & Hunt, 1984). In a further revision of his work on public relation theory, Grunig defined the two-way symmetrical model as the "excellent" approach to public relation management, due to the fact that it allows to establish a real dialogue with public, to build balanced relations, to resolve conflicts by reaching mutual understanding and to respect ethical rules which will naturally result in ethical outcomes (Grunig & Grunig, 1992).
The final step in James Grunig's crucial work on public relations theory focused on a critical development, potentially able to revolutionize the field, that is the advent of social media and the public relations in the age of digitalisation. He claimed that web 2.0 and social media, having interactive and dialogic properties, are perfectly suited to facilitate the application of two-way symmetrical, dialogical and relational communication with the public; the organizations should abandon the illusion of control over the audience, and exploit the digital media to implement the paradigm shift towards the excellent public relations
7 management (Grunig, 2009).
Keeping Grunig's work as a reference point, many scholars elaborated on public relations and social media. Kent (2010) pointed out the suitability of social media in building a two-way interaction and to collect feedbacks, also reducing anonymity and increasing the sense of propinquity between the organization and its public. Given the fact that organizations cannot exercise complete control over the cognitive representations that the members of the public develop, such as reputation and image (Bromely, 1993; Grunig & Hung, 2002), public relations managers have only one way to handle these cognitive representations: the ongoing conversation and the cultivation of relationships with audience, in which respect the digital world can play a key role (Yang, 2007). In order to improve the quality and the outcomes of such relationships, it is possible to employ some relational maintenance strategies, such as the use of conversational human voice on the online platforms or the communicated relational commitment2, that are deemed able to enhance public's trust, satisfaction, commitment and control mutuality (Kelleher, 2009).
In conclusion, scholars agree that social media provide the opportunity for organizations to manage public relations in the most appropriate manner, by establishing a real two-way interaction with their public. Organizations are now called to use these tools strategically and dialogically, without making the mistake of dumping their messages to the general audience, substantially using new media in the same ways they used old ones (Grunig, 2009).
Marketing Communication
Another area that has been remarkably affected by the rise of social media is marketing, and especially marketing communication. As Armstrong and Kotler (2011, p.405) claimed, "perhaps no other area of marketing is changing so profoundly as marketing communications, creating both exciting and scary times for marketing communicators". In this regard, one of the main and most decisive changes occurred is the shift from a one-to-many communication model, in which a corporation tried to reach a wide number of actual or potential customer allowing a very limited amount of feedback, to a many-to-many, interactive model of communication characterised by the fact that an active role is given to a wider number of actors (Hoffman & Novak, 1996). The authors defined this new landscape as a hypermedia environment, where users and consumers are enabled to provide a direct
2
For definitions and other information about these concepts, see Kelleher, T. (2009). Conversational voice, communicated commitment, and public relations outcomes in interactive online communication. Journal of
8 contribution to the development of content and meaning.
This phenomenon is being particularly evident and relevant in the social media environment, which according to Keller (2009) can be described as a modern, interactive marketplace where customers have gained power and firms have lost a certain degree of control over their communication and its effects. More specifically, consumer-empowering technologies as social media offer to customers the opportunity to be publicly heard, whether they are complaining or positively talking about a brand or a product (Ward & Ostrom, 2006; Bolton & Saxena-Iyer, 2009), and this poses unprecedented challenges to brands (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004). Accordingly with van Noort and Willemsen (2012), negative online interactions between customers, also known as negative word-of-mouth (NWOM), have been found to have detrimental effects on firms, affecting almost every key phase of a consumer’s decision-making process, such as brand evaluation, purchase intention and brand loyalty (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Vermeulen & Seegers, 2009). If not prevented or timely addressed, NWOM could turn into online firestorms (Pfeffer, Zorbach, & Carley, 2014), large amount of messages containing NWOM that have the potential to seriously threaten and damage the brand.
Given the seriousness that certain online phenomena and their potential repercussions on organizations, in which way should organizations behave online, in order to overcome possible problems, generate positive word-of-mouth and exploit the full potential of social networking applications? Here again, the dialogue with the public seems to be a crucial element in order to be successful in the online world. As demonstrated by a study conducted by Colliander, Dahlén, and Modig (2015), which compared the effects produced by communicating with costumers on social media either one-way or with an actual dialogue, the two-way communication has been found capable to enhance crucial aspects as brand attitude and purchase intentions. The authors found that companies that actively seek for consumers' advices and complains in social media tend to experience an increase in all key marketing metrics. Many other scholars have underlined the importance of a two-way exchange with the public on social media. Goldenberg (2016), for instance, claimed that it is crucial for brands to shift from one-way broadcast to two-way dialogue with each one of the customer in order to be successful for the next 15 years; Saperstein and Hastings (2011) highlighted that customers should be allowed to shape the company activities thorough dialogue on social networks; lastly, Gronroos (2000) asserted that dialogue is the most effective marketing strategy because both parties meaningfully communicate with each other.
9 the audience on social media, two functions deemed to be crucial by several scholars. By carefully listening to the members of the public in different electronic venues it is possible to address their concerns in advance, avoiding NWOM and generating positive outcomes for the organization (Schweidel & Moe, 2014). Leeflang et al. (2008) also claimed that in order to be competitive online, it is essential for organizations to develop abilities in digital marketing analytics that allow them to acquire a better knowledge of their users, and to define and carry out strategies aimed at the development of actual relationships with consumers.
In sum, social media are a key tools for organizations in the current communication environment, which they should attempt to use in the most appropriate manner, building relationship with the external public, managing their public relations, avoiding NWOM and fostering the positive one, but also stimulating engagement and promoting the desired brand image, two aspects that I will discuss in more details in the next section, specifically devoted the activity of professional football clubs' on a particular social network, Facebook.
Football clubs on Facebook
An analysis of football clubs' Facebook pages
Despite the severe economic crisis of the last few years, the sport industry does not seem to have been negatively affected; on the contrary, the whole sector worldwide went down a path of ongoing growth (Rutherford, 2011). As a consequence, sports teams all over the world have become increasingly professionalized, commercialized and internationalized (Bauer, Stokburger-Sauer, & Exler, 2008), and the European football clubs are no exception. Given these important developments, in order to be successful it is now crucial for football clubs, to build relationships with their main stakeholders groups (Bauer, Sauer, & Schmitt, 2005), such as fans, media, sponsors and leagues. Bearing in mind what has been said in the previous sections, Facebook seems to be a key tool in today's football communication environment, especially regarding the relationship between the clubs and their fan bases. This social network, in fact, has opened a new channel for a more direct communication between the parties (Van Bruggen, Antia, Jap, Reinartz, & Pallas, 2010) and sports clubs appear to be "ideally positioned to use social media given existing fan bases and the ability to encourage consumer interactions with the sport product, with athletes, and with team personnel" (Wallace, Wilson & Miloch, 2011, p. 423).
Since very few studies have explored the different types of content published by professional football clubs on their official Facebook page networks (Brand & Klein, 2012), the first aim of this work is to discover how they choose to communicate with fans and with the outside world. More specifically, the purpose of the initial and descriptive section of this
10 work is to find out on which kind of topic (such as team games, trainings, ticket or merchandising sale, and so on) are Football clubs’ Facebook posts more focused, and which
type of post is preferred (status updates, images, video, links...), verifying as well whether or
not top clubs (those with the bigger fan base, here identified as greater than one million fans) and regular clubs (those with less than one million fans) differ in what they communicate and how.
Therefore, the first research question that this work aims to answer is:
RQ 1: To what extent football clubs of different fan base dimension differ in using their Facebook accounts?
In order to find a satisfactory answer to this question, I will run some descriptive analyses designed to find out, for each club included in the sample, the major trends emerging from the content published on the Facebook pages, and to identify the most clear differences between top and regular clubs in the management of their official accounts. The relevance of this first part of the work lies in its attempt to shed some light on the content of Football clubs’ Facebook pages, by means of an unprecedented systematic analysis of the posts published on them. The comparison between clubs of different dimension ensure an added value to the analysis and the outcomes.
Relationship with fans
As mentioned above, every football club can rely on an already established fan base; in literature, the fan has been defined as someone who can perceive him or herself as a fan of a sport, or, more specifically, of a team (Dietz-Uhler, Harrick, End, & Jaquemotte, 2000). In addition to this self-perception-based definition and to behavioural characteristics, scholars have identified the degree of attachment and the attitudinal loyalty to the team as two essential features of fans, which intensity allow to distinguish between different types of fans (Funk, Mahony & Ridinger, 2002; Bauer et al., 2008). One of the crucial peculiarities that differentiate sport from almost any other commercial sector is that it is marked by an high degree of both consumer commitment and emotional involvement (Sutton, McDonald, Milne, & Cimperman 1997; Couvelaere & Richelieu, 2005). Sport clubs are capable to create a strong sense of belonging in the spectators (Hunt, Bristol & Bashaw, 1999) also providing them with common symbols and collective identities that may lead to the creation of a sense of community that is so rare in today's increasingly individualistic society (Underwood, Bond & Baer, 2001). Moreover, the cultural dimension of the clubs is an aspect that need to be taken in account: several scholars underlined the importance of the team's geographical
11 location and the family history (the support for a club forwarded from generation to generation) as reasons for supporting a certain football club (Jones, 1997; Hunt, Bristol & Bashaw, 1999; Kapferer, 2002; Abosag, 2012).
All the features just outlined provide clubs with an extraordinarily solid base on which they can try to build even stronger relationships with their fans, using the full potential of the new environment established by social media. As stated above, social media offer the opportunity to shift from one-way to two-way relationships, transforming the fans in a precious resource for the club and involving them more directly in the communication process. In his study, Cleland (2010) claims that supporters are moving from their traditional passive position, becoming more and more active. He found out that supporters of clubs that encouraged an active fans' role, fostering an inclusive relationship and providing them with the opportunity of a two-way dialogue, are more satisfied than fans of clubs which maintained a one-way dialogue. The change in the relational paradigm between clubs and fans allowed by social media is crucial also for another reason: it has the potential to drive the creation and the growth of commercial value and brand equity (McCarthy, Rowley, Ashworth, & Pioch, 2014), which are very important components in any industry.
Based on what said, and given the research question above, this paper aims to find whether or not a difference exists between top clubs and regular clubs in the extent to which they use Facebook to actively involve fans. Although to my knowledge such comparison has never been tested and no clear evidence exist in academic literature, I assume top clubs to be more advanced in the process of fans direct involvement than regular clubs. This assumption is grounded on the fact that certain football clubs - such as Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, AC Milan, but also New York Yankees, to cite a club from another sport - have a global appeal (but also greater budget and probably an higher level of professionalization) and are likely to be more advanced than smaller clubs in all respects, including in their attempt to drive fan involvement. Thus, the first hypothesis that emerges is the following:
H1: Top clubs publish a significantly greater amount of posts oriented to the direct interaction and communication with fans than regular clubs.
By saying "post oriented to the direct interaction with fans", this study refers to all the posts containing a call to action for fans, such as contests with prizes, suggestions to read a news on the club's website or invitations to ask questions to players, and all posts in which the fans are directly present, for example their photos with club's members or with the club's logo and symbols.
12
Brand Management and Brand Equity
The fan base characteristics presented in the previous section, together with the tight bond usually existent between fans and Football clubs, provide the perfect conditions for the latters to build brands and to develop strong relationships with their fan bases (Sutton, McDonald, Milne, & Cimperman 1997). The key point here is that nowadays the athletic success is only one of the strength indicators of a club: a professional and customer-oriented brand management is in fact becoming more and more relevant, even imperative for the success of a sport brand in the long term (Bauer et al., 2005). One of the main reasons behind this assumption is that “while (athletic) success may be fleeting, a focus on commitment to customers is not” (Gladden, Irwin & Sutton, 2001, p. 301). In order to make this logic even clearer, a suitable example may be the one regarding Manchester United: despite the athletic performance of the club has worsened in the last few years, the club, thanks to a careful brand management and to solid relationship with partner and fans, maintained one of the strongest brand in the sport industry, with a value of 3.317 million dollars ("Manchester United on the Forbes Soccer Team Valuations List", 2016). More in general, it is possible to claim that a strong brand and an appropriate brand management allow clubs to prevent and to limit the detrimental financial effects of losses (Rifkin, 1999).
In order to conceptualize the value of a brand, the concept of brand equity comes into play. Although a universal definition of the term does not exist in literature, the importance of brand equity is well known and finds one of its most widespread conceptualization in the work of Keller (1993, 2009), who referred to it as “the added value provided by the brand to a product or a service”. More specifically, Keller defined it as the marketing effects uniquely determined by the brand; thus it's possible to talk about brand equity "when certain outcomes result from the marketing of a product or service because of its brand name that would not occur if the same product or service did not have that name" (Keller, 1993, p. 1). Before Keller, the pioneering work by Aaker (1991) defined brand equity as "a set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and symbol, that add to or sub-tract from the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers". As reported by Brand and Klein (2012), brand equity can be seen as the intangible asset of a corporation, which has the potential to influence a large amount of variables that are crucial for any organization. Thus, the building of strong brands must be considered as a priority in organizations' management, in order to accrue the benefits of brand equity (Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000; Kapferer, 2005).
firm-13 based brand equity, concerning the financial value of the corporation, and the customer-based brand equity, more focused on the market's perception of the brand (Christodoulides & de Chernatony 2010; Brand & Klein, 2012). In the context of our study, built on the communication activities and the public image of football organizations, the second perspective is much more relevant than the first, since it regards the customer knowledge as the central driver of brand equity (Keller, 1993). In this light, a tool such as Facebook has the potential to be really valuable for clubs in order to build brand equity (Brand & Klein, 2012). In fact, its rise, together with that of other social media, is helping corporations to "bridge the gap between the corporations and the audience" (Yan, 2011, p. 689). It is being more and more relevant for firms to establish a direct connection with customers, and the marketing communication carried out through it is enabling organizations "to link their brands to other people, places, events, brands, experiences, feelings and things" (Keller, 2009, p. 41).
In literature, brand knowledge is described as composed by two main elements: brand
awareness and brand image (Brand & Klein, 2012). The first one refers to customers'
capability to recognize a brand (Keller, 2009), while the second one is "the outcome of the favourability, strength, uniqueness and the various types of brand associations in the consumers’ memory" (Brand & Klein, 2012, p.17). This study focuses particularly on brand image, since "brand awareness is usually high for professional clubs in popular sports like soccer" (Bauer et al., 2008, p. 209), especially for clubs participating in two of the better known football leagues in the world, Italian Serie A and Spanish La Liga. While sport performances may be fluctuating and unpredictable, brand image can be managed in order to represent a positive constant in fans' perception (Bauer et al., 2008). In the field of sport industry, brand image has been conceptualized in more than one way; for the purpose of this study, the more adequate one is the Team Association Model (TAM), theorized by Gladden and Funk (2002) and then revisited by Bauer et al. (2005, 2008). This model builds on Keller's conceptualization, identifying different dimensions of brand associations that are classified in attributes, benefits and attitudes. While the second and the third are dependent on customers' perception, the attributes are directly dependent on the brand, as intrinsic or symbolic properties (Brand & Klein, 2012, Bauer et al., 2008).
This study, aiming at analyzing clubs’ communication strategies, will only focus on attributes, distinguishing between product-related and non-product-related attributes. On the one hand, product-related attributes are those features strictly linked to the physical components of a product or a service (Kaynak, Salman & Tatoglou, 2008). In the football context, they are those components that directly relate or contribute to the actual performance
14 of a team, namely: success, star player(s), head coach, team and team performance/team play (Bauer et al., 2008). On the other hand, non-product-related attributes are external aspects associated with the purchase and consuption of a product or service (Keller, 1993). In the football context, these are those aspects not directly nor strictly related to the games, and that do not affect a team performance. In this regard, I adopt here the categorization proposed by Brand & Klein (2012) which includes among non-product related attributes: management, logo and club colours, stadium, club history and tradition, club culture and values, fans, sponsor or owner, regional provenance. All the components employed in this model have been empirically validated (Bauer et al. 2008; Gladden and Funk, 2001), and are summed up in Table2.
Product-related attribues Non-product-related attributes
Success Management
Star Player(s) Logo and club colours Head Coach Club history & traditions Team members Club culture & values Team performance/play Fans
Sponsor or owner Regional provenance
Table 2: Product-related and non-product-related attributes (Brand & Klein, 2012)
Drawing on Brand & Klein’s operationalization, the study aims to test which kind of strategy Italian and Spanish football clubs of different dimensions are carrying out on their Facebook pages. The goal is to discover whether or not they are focusing predominantly on the actual product, publishing contents that are mainly related to the sport performance and to the actors directly contributing to the team's results, or if they are significantly focusing on non-product-related attributes in the attempt to build a solid image that goes beyond the pitch results and the core product of the brand. Thus, the second hypothesis is:
H2: Top clubs publish a significantly greater amount of contents focused on non-product-related attributes than regular clubs.
The existing literature doesn’t provide any clear evidence with regard to the likelihood of different types of clubs to adopt a certain strategy rather than another. Neverthless, assuming again that top clubs are strategically more advanced than regular clubs, and more aware of the importance of managing brand image on social media regardless from their core product (i.e. sport performances), I hypotheize that the first would pubish more
non-product-15 related content than the latter. This would reveal a more complex and sophisticated strategy due to the fact that use of some non-product-related components, such as the club's logo and colours, the references to club's history and the synergy with a sponsor are considered very valuable in order to strenghten a club's brand image (Bauer et al., 2008; Wallace et al., 2011)
Consumer Brand Engagement
The final part of this paper elaborates on engagement, an aspect considered crucial for the success of organizations' social media activities. The concept of consumer brand engagement, widely examined by scholars, has been defined by Hollebeek (2011) as "the level of a customer’s cognitive, emotional and behavioral investment in specific brand interactions". A key issue for organizations and marketers is to find adequate strategies to involve the audience on social media channels in order to enhance their engagement and relationship with brands (De Vries & Carlson, 2014). Companies that understood the relevance of this determinant continuously seek for strategies capable of increse consumer engagement, also trying to transform passive consumers in actively engaged individuals (Schamari & Schaefers, 2015).
Among the various strategies, some scholars have stressed the importance of stimulating a two-way dialogue, directly asking the public to share their personal involvement and experiences with the brand (Beverland, Dobele, & Farrelly, 2015); others have identified the capability of evoking positive emotions through the social media communications as a crucial factor (Yuki, 2015); other have highlighted the value of publishing helpful, functional and practical content (Jahn and Kunz, 2012) or, on the contrary, of satifying hedonic gratification needs (Madupu and Cooley, 2010) in order to boost engagement. Whatever it is the strategy or combination of stretegies preferred by an organization, here is important to bear in mind what previously said about football fans: they are not ordinary consumers, but an highly committed and emotionally attached audience. This entails that involving public through social media communication, achieving high levels of engagement, could be easier for football clubs than for firms in other industries; in addiction, such an involvement could result very compelling and satisfactory for fans themselves. The last research question that this study aims to answer is thus:
RQ2: Which kind of content published by football clubs is able to maximize fans engagement? To what extent a difference exists between top and regular clubs?
In the context of this study, the relevance of direct fan involvement through Facebook communication has already been investigated in detail. In addition to what already said,
16 literature on consumer engagement widely acknowledges the need for organizations to involve customers in a genuine conversation and ongoing dialogue (Henderson & Bowley, 2010) and to activate a two-way communication flow,not only disseminating the organizational message top-down but also directly inviting them to engage with the brand (Colliander et al., 2015). Based on this, it appears to be crucial for clubs to use their Facebook pages to directly involve fans with dialogue and various initiatives.
H3: Facebook posts containing a call to direct fan involvement produce more engagement than other posts
Another factor largely aknowledged as capable of enhancing customer engagement is the visual feature of a content. Images are deemed to be very powerful in attracting more shares, engaging customers and web visitors (Long, 2015). They are considered exceptionally useful to capture the audience's attention, to communicate a message that is rememberd, and to dramatically boost social media engagement (More, 2014). Based on these and several other articles writen by professionals in the field (Fizz, 2013; Crowl, 2005), all stressing the great capability of pictures to trigger engagement (Stelzner, 2014; Redsicker, 2014), and on the assumption already used for the previous hypotheses regarding the comparisons between top and regualr clubs, the last hypotheses of this paper are:
H4: Posts including images produce higher engagement than other posts H5: Top clubs publish more posts including images than regualr clubs
With this last section on engagement, the study aims to provide as well practical implications for social media professionals operaing in football clubs, in order to improve the official Facebook page mangement by making it more professioanlized, more appealing for fans and more oriented towards a two-way dialogue.
Method
Sample
In order to answer the research questions and to test different hypotheses the study employed a quantitative content analysis, focusing on eight clubs' Facebook official pages from Italian and Spanish major leagues. Before operating the random selection of the clubs, they were split into two sub-categories: top clubs and regular clubs. The criterion of this differentiation was provided by the number of fans that each club had on Facebook on 29 April 2016: the clubs followed by more than one million people have been considered top
17 clubs, while those with a lower number of followers have been included among the regular clubs.
The selection of the countries was determined by two main reasons. Firstly, even if this study is not directly testing a difference between the two nationalities, a dimension of comparison between countries with strong similarities - both Southern European, with a similar football and organizational culture - seemed interesting to explore. Moreover, their major leagues are two of the most important and watched worldwide, and present an identical structure: in fact, with the threshold of one million fans we have - at the moment of the data collection - 6 top clubs and 14 regular clubs in each championship. The second reason simply depended on feasibility, since the coders are able to work with Facebook's posts in Italian, Spanish and English.
The software Research Randomizer was used to randomly determine two top clubs and two regular clubs for both countries, achieving a total of eight Facebook accounts (check Appendix A for the full list of randomly selected clubs). Each one of the selected Facebook pages is content analysed for four weeks between the summer of 2015 and spring of 2016, one week for each different season (June - September 2015, September - December 2015, December - March 2016, March - June 2016). For each of the four periods, the same software was used to randomly select one out of twelve weeks.
Two main reasons justify the choice of the content analysis time span: firstly, one week (Monday-Sunday) has been considered as an adequate unit of measure because it represents a mini-cycle of work for a football club, circumscribed by the team's games. Secondly, a completeness reason justifies the decision to replicate the analysis for each season over the period of one year: in this way, it is possible to have an overview of the annual communication activities of a club on the social network, both when the calendar is full of official activities and when the long summer break occurs. An overall number of 1182 posts were coded, constituting the final sample of this research.
Coding Procedure and Data Analysis
An ad hoc codebook was created to capture the variables under study (available in its entirety in Appendix A). The different coding categories were carefully checked to provide mutual exclusivity, a crucial requisite (Neuendorf, 2013). The Facebook posts published on the official pages of the selected clubs served as units of analysis. One coder coded a total of 1182 posts published by eight clubs in the four different periods. To ensure reliability another coder was called to code, after some training sessions, the 10,2% of the sample (121 posts). Krippendorff’s alpha test macros in SPSS were conducted for each variable (Hayes &
18 Krippendorff, 2007). Results of intercoder reliability tests indicate that the coding scheme in this study meet the ideal value, reaching a more than satisfying average score of 0,965 (minimum score = 0,933; maximum score = 1). A full presentation of the intercoder reliability results can be found in Appendix B.
The coded data were analysed by means of SPSS. Firstly, some descriptive analyses were conducted in order to capture an overall idea of clubs' use of Facebook, highlighting the nature and the content of the posts, and the main differences between clubs (RQ1). Secondly, actual tests were carried out to verify the different hypotheses. A Chi-square test was conducted to test whether top clubs publish more posts aimed to direct fan involvement than regular clubs. The same analysis was employed to verify whether or not top clubs focus more on non-product related attributes than regular clubs. Then, two ANOVAs with related post hoc tests were conducted: the first one to see if posts containing direct fans involvement trigger significantly more engagement than other posts; the second to test whether posts with images produce higher engagement than other post typologies. Lastly, a cross tabulation with Chi-square test was conducted to see if top clubs publish a significantly greater amount of posts containing images than regular clubs.
Variables
The main variables employed in this study are related to the topics covered by the posts, to the presence of attributes, split in product-related and non-product-related, and to the engagement level. The variable "topic" (level of measurement: ordinal) was operationalized after a direct observation of professional clubs' Facebook pages, including among the response options all the main categories emerging from them, such as team's match and training, stadium tickets sale and club's past. The variable "attributes" (level of measurement: ordinal) was operationalized on the basis of the work of Brand & Klein (2012), in turn based on the studies by Keller (1993) and Bauer et al (2008) to distinguish between product-related and not product-related attributes. Among the product related attributes are included all posts directly related with games/pitch performance, posts showing people directly involved with field performance, and things affecting teams' results, such as trainings. Among non product related attributes are included aspects not concerning games/pitch performance nor people directly involved with these, but still crucial within a professional club. Lastly, the variable "engagement" (level of measurement: ratio) was provided directly by Netvizz, the tool employed to dowload the data. In fact, the application makes available not only the number of likes, comments and shares achieved by each post, but also an additional "engagement" metric derived from the algebric sum of the former, which I therefore used to test engagement
19 hypotheses. Complete information on these and other variables, their level of measurement and related Krippendorff’s alpha values are presented in Appendix B.
Results
How top and regular clubs make use of Facebook?
The first relevant observation is that, of the analyzed posts, 58,6% (693) were published by top clubs and 41,4 (489) by regular clubs. FC Barcelona has been the most active club in the selected periods, with 292 posts, which represent 24,7% of the total. There were no major differences with respect to the amount of posts published in different periods of the year, nor between clubs of different dimensions (see Table 2 in Appendix C). This evidence shows great commitment and professionalization by clubs, which maintain the same level of social media activity in summer, where no official games are scheduled, as in the other seasons.
Between the various types of posts, images were the most widely used overall (43,4% of the posts), followed by video (18,5%) and status (18%), while the least used were live broadcast (only 0,2%). However, remarkable differences exist between top and regular clubs. Top clubs employ images in more than half of their posts, while smaller clubs only in 31,9% of them; compared to the former, the latter make a much more extensive use of statuses (posts made by text only) and of post in which the main element is a link. The use of video broadcast is, so far, very low for clubs of both dimensions. Frequencies for each post type are displayed in Table 3.
Post type (%) per club dimension
Post type Top Regular Total
Status (text only) 9,1 30,7 18 Image(s) 51,5 31,9 43,4 Video 23,5 11,5 18,5 Live broadcast 0,1 0,2 0,2 Link to a website 14,6 24,3 18,6 Other 1,2 1,4 1,3 Total 100 100 100
Table 3: Post types (percentage) by top and regular clubs
Although posts classified as “link to a website” (i.e. posts which main feature was represented by a link) represent only 18,6% of our posts, it is interesting to note that almost in half of their posts (46,8% of cases) clubs tried to drive traffic on their official website by embedding a link in their post, even when its main feature was an image or a video. This tendency is as well more pronounced in top clubs than in regular clubs (57,2% against 32%).
20 Data about the topics covered by posts also reveal interesting patterns, summarized in Table 4. Since football games are the core activity of any club, it was expected that this topic category would have been the most used; however, a remarkable difference between clubs is apparent, with regular ones devoting more than half of their posts to games, while top ones focusing on them to a lesser extent (35,9% of posts). The table displays other clear differences between top and regular clubs: in particular, topics related to trainings, club's past, and its partners resulted to be more frequently addressed by top clubs. On the other hand, regular clubs tend to give more space to the official statements of members of the club's and to other clubs' teams.
Use of post topics (%) per club dimension
Topics T R Topics T R
Team's match 35,9 50,9 Post related to a club's player 11,3 12,7 Team's training 9,2 4,5 Post related to a club's partner 2 0 Ticket sale 2,3 2,5 Practical information for fans 3,6 1,8 Official merchandising sale 1,2 1,2 Direct fan involvement 12,1 7,2 Club's past 4,9 0,8 Other club's team (youth, female teams) 2,2 4,9 Member of the club official statement 6,2 8,2 Other 8,7 4,9 Sharing of a official press release by the
club
0,4 0,4 Total 100 100
Table 4: Use of post topics (percentage by top and regular clubs)
Furthermore, top and regular clubs differ in the space devoted to direct fan involvement (12,1% of the total by top clubs, only 7,2% by regular ones). To test hypothesis one and determine if there is a statistical association between the use of this topic and the club dimension, a Chi-square test was conducted, revealing a significant effect, with top clubs more inclined to seek for direct interaction with fans, χ² (1, N = 1182) = 7,802, p = 0.005. Thus, H1 is confirmed.
Another key variable to test differences between the strategies adopted by clubs of different fan base dimension is, as outlined in the previous sections, the one regarding the attributes covered by the post. While product-related attributes concern the aspects strictly related the club's core activity (i.e. the football game and its main protagonists), non-product-related attributes are non-product-related to club's image but not directly linked with sport performance. To test hypothesis 2 and determine if top clubs tend to give more room to non-product-related attributes, a cross tabulation with Chi-square test was conducted. It revealed a significant association between club dimension and attributes, with top clubs granting more space to
non-21 product-related attributes (34,3% of the total) than regular clubs (only 19,2%), χ² (1, N = 1182) = 32,452, , p < 0.001. H2 is therefore confirmed.
Use of attributes (%) per club dimension
Attribute Top Clubs Regular clubs
Product-related attributes 65,7 80,8 Non-product related attributes 34,3 19,2
Total 100 100
Table 5: Use of attributes by top and regular clubs(percentage)
Amongst the product-related attributes only, clubs of both dimensions focuses mainly on team’s performance and play, with contents related to games and trainings being amongst the most frequently published (63,5% for top clubs, 70,1% for regular clubs). Bigger clubs focuses more on success (7,3%) than smaller ones (2,8%), fact that simply reflect their higher amount of sporting success. A similar space is devoted to star players (top clubs 20,4%, regular clubs19,4%). For a complete overview, check table 7 in Appendix C. Moving on non-product related attributes, both clubs grant the wider space to fans (55,5% for top clubs and 69,1 regular clubs). Nevertheless, it is important to remind that overall non-product related attributes are most widely present in posts from top clubs, so that the space dedicated to fans is bigger in smaller clubs only in comparison to other non-product related attributes, and not in absolute terms. Bigger clubs dedicate more room to club's history and traditions (17,1% vs. 6,4%), to the stadium and its atmosphere (8,8% vs. 3,2%) and to their sponsors and owners (5% vs. 1,1%) than smaller clubs. The latter, on the contrary, publish more posts abut regional provenance (9,6% vs. 0,8%) than top clubs. Table 8 in Appendix C provides a summary of these findings.
Engagement
Hypothesis 3 aims to test whether or not the use of posts containing direct fan involvement produce higher engagement than other topics. In order to verify this assumption, an ANOVA with post hoc tests was conducted. The first finding is that there is a significant effect of the topic used on overall engagement, F(12, 1169) = 3,78, p < 0.001. The means (see table 9 in the appendix) show that only posts related to a club's partner (M = 39098, N = 14) and on club's past (M = 44926, N = 38) trigger a higher level of engagement compared to those containing direct fan involvement (M = 38756, N = 119). Despite this, Bonferroni post hoc tests revealed significant difference between direct fan involvement and other topics only when compared with posts focused on team's match (MD = 22393, p = ,002) and on other club's teams (MD = 32818, p = ,047). Given this result, H3 is only partially confirmed.
22 Another ANOVA with post hoc tests has been conducted in order to verify hypothesis 4, and namely if posts with one or more images are likely to trigger more engagement than other post typologies. A significant effect of post type on engagement was proven, F(5, 1176) = 14,88, p < 0.001. The means (see table 10 in the Appendix) display that posts containing images largely outnumber the other typologies in stimulating engagement, with a mean of 35293 (N = 513); the second type, videos, reach a much lower average number (M = 24940, N = 219). Nevertheless, Bonferroni post hoc test revealed significant statistical difference only when posts with images are compared to statuses (text only, MD = 35012, p < 0.001), but not to other typologies. Thus, as for H3, H4 can be considered only partially confirmed.
Images and direct fan involvement seem to be able to trigger a high fan engagement, but how different clubs use this topic and this type of content? H1 already revealed that top clubs make a wider use of direct fan involvement; the last hypothesis (H5) aims to test if they also employ images significantly more than regular clubs. A cross tabulation with Chi-square was conducted, revealing a significant association between club dimension and use of images: top clubs use them in more than half of their posts (51,5%), regular clubs only in 31,9 of cases, χ² (1, N = 1182) = 44,89, p < 0.001. H5 is therefore confirmed.
Discussion
The aim of this study was to investigate the use that professional clubs make of Facebook, also providing insights on the different strategies employed by top and regular clubs. Particular attention has been placed on the amount of posts attempting to direct fans involvement, on the tendencies about the use of product-related or non-product-related attributes, and on the average engagement level triggered by various post typologies and topics. The results showed that, despite the social media management of Italian and Spanish major leagues' football clubs is overall highly professionalized, with all clubs under examination having a regularly updated Facebook page in every period of the year, remarkable differences exist between clubs of different dimensions. More precisely, top clubs seem to be much more aware about the potentialities of this tool, and to have a far more advanced and strategic vision that guides their pages' management.
Looking more in details to the results, it emerges immediately that top clubs use this social medium to reach a wide and geographically dispersed public, translating a great part of their posts in English, allowing in this way a worldwide audience to follow the updates of the page; regular clubs, on the contrary, seem to be more focused on their local and national fan base. Moreover, top clubs seem to be significantly more committed to directly involve fans
23 through their Facebook posts by means of contests and quiz, by promoting the use of a certain hashtag or profile picture filter to show support for the club and, more in general, stimulating their active participation. The "direct fan involvement" topic is the second most used by the biggest club, while it only reaches the fourth place for smaller clubs. This attitude is awarded by fans with a high average level of engagement. Top clubs are also more inclined to give space to aspects of team's life that go beyond the actual performance and its main protagonists. This part of the research, built on Keller's (1993) customer-based brand equity model, shows that top clubs are aware of the fact that "core game or performance are just an element of a larger ensemble (...) all these elements extend the sport product beyond the context itself" (Mullin, Hardy & Sutton, 2000). Accordingly with Brand and Klein (2012), club's usage of Facebook can strengthen costumer brand equity, especially if it is focused not only on the core product but on non-product-related attributes as well; it is a suitable way to produce a brand extension that can help in creating brand equity (Bauer, Sauer & Schmitt, 2005). Hence, while regular clubs seem more focused on providing fans with news and updates on games and club's players, top clubs, aware of the value of a more comprehensive management of their communication through social media, publish content that cover a much wider range of subjects. Lastly, accordingly with many professionals (Fizz, 2013; Stelzner, 2014; Karr, 2013; Rampton, 2014), posts containing photos have proven to be the more capable in driving higher levels of engagement. Top clubs exploited this charachteristic significantly more than regular clubs, including pictures in more than half of their posts and showing again their better knowledge of the social media environment and of their fans' preferences.
This study makes three main contributions to the theory on sport and social media. Firstly, a complete exploration of the communication activities carried out by professional football clubs has been executed, taking into account the languages, the post types and the topics employed by eight professional clubs. Moreover, while the existing literature focused mainly on American sports (see Waters et al., 2011) or English Premier League clubs (see McCarthy, Rowley, Ashworth, & Pioch, 2014; Brand & Klein, 2012), here the communication strategy of Italian and Spanish clubs, both from Southern European countries' where two of the most followed championships worldwide take place, is analyzed. Unlike previous studies, no periods of the year have been left unexplored: a posts sample taken in all four seasons of the year has been content analyzed. As Brand and Klein (2012) did for English clubs, the focus has also been placed on attributes (product or non-product-related), allowing the study to provide insights on the existence of an underlying brand strategy in
24 team's communication that is able to look over the actual field performance.
The second, crucial contribution concerns the comparison between top and regular clubs. This has, to my knowledge, never been done in previous researches, and was able to underline some significant and meaningful differences between the social media management of clubs that have different fan base (but also economical) dimensions. In fact, despite the high level of professionalization that characterize football teams in both countries, the study revealed remarkable diversities between the two club categories in the awareness of the importance of managing Facebook to exploit its full potential, and in the effectiveness with which they do that.
The last contribution is represented by a confirmation of the existing literature regarding the special nature of the relationship between football clubs and fans. Despite the differences in size, every club included in the study could count on an already established fan base (Dietz-Uhler, Harrick, End & Jaquemotte, 2000), which is easily engaged by the club, especially by means of direct fan involvement strategies and of contents and references to the team's past. These two elements, being able to leverage on fans' commitment and emotional involvement with their club (see Couvelaere & Richelieu, 2005), have proven to be perfectly suited to enhance fans' online participation, facilitating their transition from a passive to a active role (see Cleland, 2010).
Although these relevant contributions, certain limitations must be considered. Firstly, the inclusion of other European major leagues' clubs, such as German Bundesliga, English
Premier League and French Ligue 1, could be considered. This would allow comparisons
between countries belonging to different areas of Europe, where different football and organizational cultures exist (see Wagg, 1995, Missiroli, 2002).
Secondly, the engagement measure provided by Netvizz is rather rough, since it gives equal weight to likes, comments and shares. These three "actions", however, entail a different degree of involvement: likes are considered light reactions, comments are an expression of what someone thinks, while shares implies the maximum level of exposure, with the author suggesting a content to his or her social media contacts (Haydon, 2013).
Thirdly, this study does not consider the content of comments and if they express positive or negative attitudes towards the club.
Future researches could address these limitations by extending the clubs’ sample to other countries, employing a more precise and sophisticated engagement measure able to assign a different weight to likes, comments and shares, and considering what the fans actually think by content analyzing their comments. It would also be interesting to investigate,
25 by means of a survey, the fans' level of satisfaction with their club's official page management.
In addition to new theoretical insights, and despite the acknowledged limitations, the findings of this study have a number of practical implications for clubs and social media operators within them. Firstly, as suggested by the literature on public relations (Grunig, 2009, Kent, 2010) it is crucial to establish a two-way dialogue, exploiting the inherently dialogical nature of Facebook by publishing content that are aimed to involve fans in a direct interaction with the club. The most direct and captivating way to attract fan involvement is by means of a contest to which every fan can participate. One of the best examples of this practice was promoted by Atlético de Madrid and its main sponsor: the club raffled in fact a weekend in Madrid, the opportunity to be part of the seasonal team picture, and a ticket to attend the game between Atlético and Valencia. Similarly, FC Barcelona every month gives away three official team's jerseys to fans participating in a contest. Another way to involve fans, less directly but still efficaciously, is stimulating their involvement even with posts that are product-related. A perfect example is again provided by FC Barcelona, which when publishing the photos of a game, often asks fans to chose their favourite.
Secondly, even if publishing content related to games, players and coaches cannot be overlooked, it is as well important to allow enough space to non-product-related attributes, as also claimed by literature on brand image management (Brand & Klein, 2012; Bauer et al., 2008). Among these, not only communication directed to fans is effective: posts related to clubs' history have proved to be the most successful in triggering fans engagement, making the most of the high level of emotional involvement and sense of belonging existing between the fans and their team (see Couvelaere & Richelieu, 2005; Hunt, Bristol & Bashaw, 1999). It is highly illustrative in this respect the fact that, amongst the posts published by ACF Fiorentina, the most successful among fans was the one celebrating Gabriel Batistuta's birthday, one of the icons of the club's history. Through the use of non-product-related attributes, moreover, is possible to strengthen consumer-based brand equity and reinforce relationship with fans even when the sports results worsen.
Lastly, the use of visual content in general and images in particular is highly recommended, even when the aim is to provide an information for which the only text would be sufficient. Even in this latter case, in fact, it is advisable to match the text with a related photo. During every team's game, Atalanta publishes a great deal of statuses about the conduct of it; this is a wrong practice, both because it is very unlikely that nowadays fans follow the match with textual updates on Facebook, and because they tend to prefer
audio-26 visual items. Thus, it seems better to limit updates to significant events of the game, and combine text with a meaningful picture, as top clubs usually do.
Conclusion
The goal of this research was to explore how professional football clubs make use of Facebook, revealing substantial differences between regular and top clubs and identifying post characteristics capable of maximizing fan engagement. The study, despite the limitations, reaches its objectives providing new insights on how clubs communicate through Facebook, demonstrating the existence of remarkable differences between the communication strategies adopted by regular and top clubs, and indicating how clubs should behave in order to improve their relationships with fans, also boosting their engagement.
Facebook offers exciting opportunities to clubs, unthinkable only a decade ago. Yet, if used in an incorrect way it may be irrelevant or even backfire the club. Hence, it is crucial to manage it in a professional and aware manner; doing so, clubs will be able to increase the engagement triggered by their online communication, improve their brand image and strengthen consumer-based brand equity. However, one of the keys is to understand the dialogical nature of the tool, and capitalise on it: this means to directly involve fans, understand what their preferences are and activate a two-way dialogue with them. This is the first and most important step towards a fruitful and satisfactory management of football clubs' social media accounts.
