By Paul Nicholson
April 20 – Real Madrid and Barcelona are not just giants on the pitch, they are social media monsters off it. The two Spanish clubs head Insideworldfootball’s European club ranking in terms of followers, with the English Premier League’s Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea in 3rd, 4th and 5th place respectively.
Even just taking English language Twitter feeds only, the two Spanish clubs are way ahead of the Premier League trio with almost three times as many followers as the English teams in their non-native language.
The Insideworldfootball stats took the top 10 European clubs in UEFA’s points ranking, and looked at totals of followers to their twitter channels as well as the tweet activity.
Real Madrid and Barcelona lead the charts on both counts each with nearly 30 million followers. Both clubs have embraced multiple language Twitter accounts with Barca translating into seven languages and Real into four. The stats combine all the followers and do not take into account any followers who might track more than one language account.
Barcelona show the most twitter activity, leading the tweet chart. Italy’s Inter split the Spanish clubs in second spot with Real third. While Inter are the most active, they are not the lead club in terms of twitter followers in Italy, where the top spot belongs to AC Milan, followed by Juventus.
Arsenal and Chelsea hold up in terms of number of tweets, but Man Utd bring up the bottom of the table with the least tweet activity. A position they generally occupied in Insideworldfootball’s Premier League until about 6 weeks ago when they started to increase their activity.
Germany’s Bayern Munich also hold up well with almost 2.5 million followers on twitter in a market that has not fully embraced the social media to the extent that the Spanish and English markets have.
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