The State of Football Social Media 2024: The Results

Thanks to everyone who submitted responses for this year's survey. This year 98 of you responded to share your thoughts on how your team is planning to use social media across 2024.

This year, respondents came from 14 different countries. The UK made up more than half of submissions, and 91% of people looked after the accounts for domestic teams. There were some submissions from people managing national team accounts and leagues, football associations, and governing bodies - the first time I've made that distinction.

The majority of teams featured in the survey (98%) are non-league and above, with people either working on men's teams or both men's and women's teams. Three submissions came from people who work solely on women's teams' accounts.

The bulk of marketing teams (57.1%) are made up of between two and five people, with 19.4% of teams featuring between six and ten people, and 15.3% being solo marketers. Teams with 11+ people are in the minority (8.2%) out of those who responded.

What follows is a break down of the different results. If you find any of the results useful and want to share them on social media, please tag @onlinerule in anything. I'd love to see your thoughts.

You can view results from 2023, 2022, and 2021, on the site.

To try and keep some form of consistency I've kept the format the same as last year.

Social networks

First up, which platforms are the most popular?

Interestingly, not a single platform has a 100% uptake among the clubs that responded. The closest is Twitter/X, which was used by 99% of the people who took part.

Next up is Facebook (98%), and Instagram (96.9%), closely followed by YouTube (93.9%). TikTok is continuing to grow though, its gone from 53% in 2022, to 78% in 2023, to 81.6% now.

The newest platform, Threads, sits seventh with 63.3% usage. That's not bad for something that only launched halfway through the year.

As with last year, I asked everyone to rank the sites in order of importance.

I've highlighted the top seven channels for this one.

Twitter/X keeps its crown as the channel with the most 'very important' responses, followed by Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. TikTok's percentage of 'very important' responses has jumped from 34.6% to 41.9% this year. Twitter/X's importance has dropped a bit year-on-year, however.

When it comes to launching on new channels, 68.4% said they had quite enough on their plates at the moment. Of those that do plan to launch new channels in 2024, TikTok (8.2%) and WhatsApp are out in front. YouTube and Threads (both 5.1%) are tied in third place.

Email and influencer marketing

I don't know why, but I expected more teams to be using email marketing. Last season 85.7% of respondents said they sent email newsletters, but that figure has dropped off.

Most of the teams who fit into the 'no' category here classed themselves as non-league level. It's perhaps not surprising to see it being used more at higher levels, given some of the costs involved in running and maintaining databases.

More clubs should look at it though. Gathering first-party data is becoming a bigger issue in marketing due to the slow decline and diminishing reliability of third-party cookies. Capturing email addresses and doing some basic segmentation could make a big difference in boosting attendances and selling merch.

For influencer marketing, the balance has stayed more or less the same as last year (42.9% in 2022 compared to 40.8% in 2023).

When looking at plans for the coming year a lot of teams do seem quite committed to it. We'll see how that plays out.

I'm noticing a bit of an uptick in influencer partnerships with clubs. I've previously written about the Expired Film Club's partnership with Oxford City, as well as Newcastle's work with a local photographer and Man City's content with comedian Troy Hawke. It's a good way to grow your audience and get in front of new eyeballs.

Paid social media

Organic social media gets a lot of the attention in marketing. But paid social has a big part to pay in a lot of teams' online successes.

61.9% of respondents last year said they'd used paid social in 2022. That number is down to 48% this year. Like with email marketing, a lot of the people who said no classed themselves working at non-league level, where the budgets likely don't allow for it.

Facebook and Instagram took up the lion's share of the budget here (91.5% and 72.3% respectively). Twitter/X was next (31.9%), followed by TikTok (14.9%).

38.3% of the people who responded said they spent more than £2,501 across those platforms last year. Next year I'll introduce higher cost groupings to get a better view of some budgets.

A few more respondents say they do plan to invest in paid social over the coming months. Again, Meta properties (Facebook and Instagram) are out in front, followed by Twitter/X and TikTok. And budgets remain at more than £2,501 for 30.2% of accounts.

Content creation

I always like seeing what priorities people have over the coming months. More out of my own curiosity than anything else.

What's been consistent is that people want to make more videos. Short form (40.8%) and long form (27.6%) remains the most popular formats. Podcasts have declined since last year (13.3%, down from 17.5%).

I classed short form video as anything up to 30 seconds in length.

Strategies for success

Engagement remains out in front when it comes to how teams decide on the success of their social channels. More teams are concerned with follower counts than last year (9.2% compared to 3.2%), as well as thinking more about online sentiment than before (7.1% compared to 1.6%).

Unsurprisingly, social media continues to be important to teams' marketing. 98% of respondents said it was somewhat or very important to their overall marketing.

Despite this importance, only 59.2% of respondents have a documented social media strategy.

Out of the number of teams who said they don't have a documented strategy, 58.9% classed themselves as at professional or elite level. Like last year, this is a surprise given the importance social media has to a team's marketing (based on the last question).

What's probably unsurprising is that out of teams with a documented social media strategy the overwhelming majority (92.5%) have marketing departments with more than one person in them.

If you want to have a look through the results, there's an interactive version of the report available in Looker Studio. It doesn't work as well on mobile (that's the platform, rather than anything I've done), but you can filter by country, level, and marketing team size to dive deeper into responses.

Free reign

To finish, I asked people what their priorities are for 2024. Some of the responses were:

• Raise community awareness of the club to increase attendances.
• Ticket sales.
• Increase relatability of players.
• Move into Arabic and Chinese markets.
• Bring the fans closer to the club.
• Launch a new website.
• Increase fan interaction.
• Get younger fans involved.
• More collaborations with influencers.

All good priorities, and food for thought for the newsletter across 2024. I did also ask people what they'd like to see more of through the newsletter and social channels, and I'll be taking that all on board too.

Normal service will be resumed in the newsletter next week. And keep an eye out for 2025's survey launching in December!