On the 27th day of Ligue 1, Olympique de Marseille hosted ASSE at the Velodrome. Beyond the victory of the Olympians 2-0, the main fact of the game was the completely crazy celebration of its striker Mario Balotelli. In the 12th minute of play, he opened the score and celebrated his goal live on Instagram. If his gesture is not unlike Totti's selfie shot 4 years ago during a Roman derby, Mario went even further by sharing his joy live with his 8.5 million Instagram followers. A feat that garnered a lot of attention, with the daily L'Equipe even awarding him It's Monday's one.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Buj_dgdHZj7/
A live and the web is on fire
Thanks to our proprietary methodology we were able to extract all the stories and posts on Instagram and watch the noise generated around this media coup. Our Engagement Labs also extracted and analyzed the reactions of the audiences as a comment on Mario Balotelli's Instagram post.
A peak in mentions relating to Balotelli observed on the night of the match on the whole web
There were 22,011 pieces of content relating to Balotelli published between 3 and 5 March, and 7,280 explicitly mentioning Balotelli and Instagram. No less than 546 media reported on Mario Balotelli's live show. Beyond sports newspapers such as L'Equipe, Sport Bild, Sport Bild, Marca or La Gazzeta dello Sporto, it is the entire international press that has taken up the subject: CNN, Spiegel, the BBC, The World...
Mario Balotelli also has a direct impact on the visibility of the club, which is regaining levels of mention similar to those known when he signed with the club at the end of January.
Originally in story format, this video was also included in the player's classic news feed but also in that ofOlympique de Marseille And of Puma that were quoted directly by Super Mario in his post.
Out of these 3 accounts, this selfie represented more than 2.1M social actions (likes + comments), and 9M views. It's a real engagement booster, whether for Mario Balotelli with 6x more social actions than his usual average or Olympique de Marseille with 4 times more social actions.
“Balotelli offered a €270K media plan to OM with his selfie on Instagram. Is the media coverage of the fallout valued in millions of euros,” says Quentin, Consulting Director at The Metrics Factory.
On the official PUMA account, Balotelli's post caused less reaction from the audience, on the one hand because it was posted on the account a day after the first post and on the other hand because PUMA's audience must be less compatible with the player and the club.
*We see similar proportions when we look at the visibility and views of the post.
Taking a close look at the comments, this post generated nearly 12 times more on Mario Balotelli's count than his usual average for a total of over 8,600 comments.
So we were interested in the reaction of these audiences, which used a large number of superlatives to praise Mario Balotelli on Instagram: “Grande”, “King”, “Legend” while asking the famous EA Sports soccer game, FIFA, to integrate this celebration.
These comments were often accompanied by emojis or consisted only of emojis with 58% of comments that contain at least one emoji to arrive at an average of 1.5 emojis per comment.
Among all emojis, we find the most used emoji on social networks, the “tears of joy” but also Emojis dedicated to OM with blue and white circles and hearts and the emoji. Note the presence of the goat emoji, used by detractors.
We mainly find Congratulations emojis where emojis to accompany superlatives (Crown, fire, twitched biceps, applause,...).
To date, despite direct mentions to EA Sports by the commentators, Olympique de Marseille and Mario Balotelli, EA Sports did not respond.
It is interesting to note that Balotelli managed to collect nNumerous comments from influencers, brands and media (5% of commenters have more than 5,000 followers) and that 34 commenters have over 100K followers. The main “influencer” account that commented is a brand with 6.2M followers.
Out of the 8,600 comments, Balotelli responded directly to 5 people:
- Morgan Sanson (OM player) who knew about it and gave him An advice
- Fabrizio Miccoli (Ex-Italian player)
- Crazeclown (Actor)
- Brianetemad (CEO of http://www.tamleek.ae/)
- WeAfrica_AdrianoNuzzo (Association)
Conclusion
A real success in terms of sport, the choice of Balotelli proved to be a good communication asset.
This move, orchestrated by the player and relayed by the club, made it possible to offer global visibility at OM and Ligue 1 Conforama.
Media coverage is estimated in Millions of euros and saved OM €270K in media plans on Instagram
Who will be the next player to imitate him? Anyway, Mario Balotelli and Olympique de Marseille will be Forever the first.
Thanks to Quentin and Erwan for their invaluable help on the various aspects of this analysis.
