FC Basel and SC Bern are social media champions

Sports clubs around the world are expanding their social media presence. In Switzerland too, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become important tools for fan loyalty and marketing. The online platform Socialswitzerland.ch currently shows the status of the best Swiss football and ice hockey clubs in the world of likes, shares and tweets.

The study examined the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels of clubs from the top leagues (Raiffeisen Super League in football and National League A in ice hockey). 

FC Basel: most fans

In terms of absolute numbers, FC Basel is the clear leader with a total of 1.4 million fans. FC Zurich follows in second place with just under 9,000,000, although the huge gap in numbers between the two is astonishing: FC Basel's virtual fan community is 14 times larger than that of FC Zurich. The difference could be due to their greater popularity abroad. "Numerous transfers of FCB players to top European clubs, but also international arrivals from online-savvy countries, such as Kakitani (Japan), are likely to have a significant positive influence on FCB's social media presence," suspects Manuel P. Nappo, Head of the Center for Digital Business at the HWZ. However, it is only possible to make assumptions from the outside, as "only the clubs have more precise data profiles of their social media customers," says Webguerilla's Managing Director Dino Ceccato.

Enjoying interaction at FC Aarau

Although FC Basel has a considerable volume of fans, the interaction rate at the club from north-western Switzerland is rather modest. With a PTA index (people talking about) of just 1.8%, FC Basel is in ninth place. Not so with FC Aarau: with a PTA index of 18%, the online community of the traditional Aargau club demonstrates a high level of engagement on social media channels.

Lots of twittering at FC Thun

Although Twitter is still a wallflower in Switzerland compared to Facebook, there are also interesting observations to be made on this channel. If you look at the "interaction per fan" figure (ratio of the sum of retweets and mentions to the number of followers), you can see that FC Thun triggers a lot of tweeting with an index value of 3.56%. Astonishing here too: FC Basel is in last place with 0.18 percent.

Ice hockey: Linear fan distribution

The distribution of fans in ice hockey is much more even. The ranking of fan numbers shows a flat downward curve: at the top is SC Bern with 50,000, in second place is ZSC with around 40,000, followed by HC Davos, Fribourg Gottéron and Geneva Servette with around 30,000 fans each. What is striking here is the relatively large gap between 5th and 6th place in the ranking: The fan volume of Geneva Servette is almost twice as large as that of EV Zug.

The figures are updated on an ongoing basis and can be viewed on the "Social Switzerland" platform, a collaboration between the HWZ University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration Zurich and Webguerillas. The platform was first launched in 2013 with the social media presence of the Swiss cantons and cantonal capitals on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.