Richard Arnold, group managing director of Manchester United was at the Web Summit in Dublin chose to explain how United had gone about building itself into one of the most consumed digital media entities in the world, with the "number one and fastest growing Facebook site", and the "biggest website in the world", reports www.sportspromedia.com/. "In terms of our digital media channels, we're directly in touch with 120 million fans. 60 million of those via Facebook. We're engaging with 35 million of that 60 million every month. 38 million - some of the old gits like me - that we're in touch with via email, mobile etc with a comparatively small overlap. And then we've got nascent social media channels.
"It's a big pond that we operate in, so how do we translate that into engagement?" asked Arnold rhetorically. "243 countries in the world where we're getting fans engaging with us. 264 tweets a minute, 400,000 a day about or to Manchester United, and 12 million posts that our fans are generating a month - that's heavily active."
Two and half years after the Facebook launch, United branched out to other channels: Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, and crucially given United's claim to have 110 million Chinese fans, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo in China.
"Fan engagement underpins everything we do. It drives sponsorship integration, which is a huge source of funds for us; content distribution; database expansion - the 40 million people we're in touch with ourselves over and above our social media platforms - and product sales."
United have journalists, "content creators", operating in 18 languages in over 240 countries around the world. Those content creators generate about 3,000 social posts a month. Content has to be "culturally appropriate" and inoffensive.
Arnold supported his presentation with a series of sometimes remarkable slides. The 'first to three million Twitter followers' slide puts United well out in front of any other sports club.
Every hour, Arnold said, there are 200 mainstream media news articles written about Manchester United. For every piece of information we generate,160 articles are written about it, and then about 14,000 people will generate tweets about every article or post that we generate."
That multiplier effect has resulted in Manchester United's media operation becoming the most engaging in the world. According to Arnold there are more people talking about United everyday on the internet than the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona, the LA Lakers and Dallas Cowboys, even Justin Bieber and Rihanna.
