With social media growing and evolving everyday with every minute and second that passes by, the demand for it will also grow. The two most popular social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, are still meteorically rising each and every day. These two platforms can have a huge influence to the experience of customers and fans alike. Social media’s mass appeal is the fact that information can be sent anywhere in the world with a mere use of someone’s fingertips pressing send. There is no denying that people want to be heard, and they use social media platforms to do so; the way that people use social media to be heard is to share (tweet) articles, music, pictures, videos and in this case, ‘mentioning, liking, and commenting.’ For example, if a business or event is deemed valuable and important by people, than people will use social media to share it to their on-line community; as was the case for the 2011 UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League Final between Manchester United and FC Barcelona on May 28, 2011.
“FC Barcelona and Lionel Messi were the names on everyone’s fingertips on Saturday as the UEFA Champions League final took over popular social media platforms Facebook and Twitter.”
The popularity of this event surpasses the popularity of the NFL’s Super Bowl (most popular game in the U.S.) with hundreds of millions of people tuning in to see the biggest stage in the sport. Knowing the popularity of this event and social media, UEFA leveraged the online demand to their advantage through extensive coverage across these platforms.
“On Friday, Saturday and Sunday alone, 280 articles were published about the final on the website in 12 languages. In addition, four full-length video magazine programmes were produced by the team on site in London during the week of the final, with a total of 74 UEFA.com videos published in eight languages…as well as; Fans were also able to interact on the site’s daily blogs, the live MatchCentre chat as well as the increasingly popular UEFA.com and UEFA Champions League Facebook pages.”
The time and effort that UEFA put into satisfying the demand through creating great content by extending their coverage and the platforms they chose proved to be successful. The UEFA Champions League Facebook Page garnered over 1,500 ‘likes’ and around 200 comments. If this was not enough – “The fixture generated over two million mentions on Facebook during the game.” In addition, Twitter was dominated by tweets about this event. “On Twitter, meanwhile, the final drove updates on the microblogging service to almost unprecedented levels. There were 6,303 tweets per second…” The UEFA campaign to give the people as much as they wanted proved vital to the experience of the fan, as seen in the social media statistics. UEFA was able to integrate social media to the game, so that fans can have an even greater experience. The social media demand from the people to create content on these platforms should not be denied, for endless possibilities lie. Imagine what this exposure can do for a business.