SEVILLA WITH THE SEVENTH BIGGEST FOLLOWER INCREASE OF EUROPEAN CLUBS ON CHINESE WEIBO PLATFORM

With respect to its strategy for internationalisation, Sevilla FC continues to make progress in one of its most important markets, China. According to the latest statistics, Sevilla FC was the seventh largest-growing European football club on Weibo in 2022, one of the biggest social media sites in China. Furthermore, in LaLiga Sevilla is second on this ranking, just lower than FC Barcelona.

This all lines up with the Strategic Plan of the club, that has internationalisation and digitalisation as its two main focal points, and is what the club is focusing on as a brand to obtain the desired results. In fact, Sevilla FC now has a presence on three social media platforms in China. As well as Weibo, the club is also active on Douyin, the Asian TikTok, and Wechat, with over 850,000 followers. In the afore mentioned Weibo, the club has more than 784,000 followers showing the impressive growth of the club, as this is a 33% increase in comparison to what the club had at the end of 2021. Moreover, it is worth highlighting two other figures which show how the club has grown throughout 2022. One the one hand there is the reach of the club which has increased by 238%, and on the other is the engagement, which has grown by 22% from 2021 on Weibo. The number of followers also increased by 33% on this social media platform.

Followers on this social network have increased by 33% compared to 2021.

One of the reasons for this was importance the club placed on digital content and the relationships built with sponsors, including a collaboration with LaLiga, which helped the club to spread its online presence. Furthermore, one must highlight the justified risk the club took in creating content orientated towards the interests and tendencies of the Asian public, and reinforcing these messages from local influencers and live content. One doesn’t need to look any further than the last Studio Show, emitted through Weibo which provided a preview for the Real Sociedad game in November, and had a total of 1.2 million views.

One of the last specific events for the Chinese public was the celebration of the Chinese New Year, one of the most important festivities in the Chinese culture, which coincided with the match against Cádiz CF a few days ago, where a series of campaigns were organised by Valvoline, the club's sponsor. In addition, in the stadium itself, there were different nods to the Chinese public, such as a commemorative T-shirt at the team's entrance to the pitch and a congratulatory message in Chinese on the match shirt itself. This celebration is still ongoing with various events, which will culminate with the broadcast of a new Studio Show in the run-up to the match against FC Barcelona on 5 February.