With 29.3 million French people interested in soccer (source: Repucom), Ligue 1 Football is the most followed sports competition in France. Facebook, the platform that brings together more than one French person out of two, is presented as the largest stadium in the world. Beyond these figures, is it possible to draw up a typical profile of a soccer fan on Facebook? To answer this question, we collected more than 1.5 million comments on the official pages of the main French soccer clubs, and of the Professional Football League (LFP) for 6 months.Our approach:We implemented innovative Big Data technologies (Talend, Neo4j...) to reconstruct the graph of exchanges between these supporters and the content posted on Facebook by the clubs. The purpose of this approach was to build a typology of football fans according to: - Activity criteria: fans comment more or less frequently on the page of their favorite clubs- The forms of their comments: the variety of vocabulary used, the social aspect (mentions of friends...) or the emotional aspect of the comments (mentions of friends...) or emotional aspects of the comments (emojis...) To do this, we had to build original indicators, based on our raw material: Facebook comments. We have deployed innovative text mining and social network analysis technologies. We also used audience planning tools (Facebook Audience Insights...). The originality of the approach consists in particular in building profiles for each commentator (>757K individuals) in order to deduce dominant behaviors within fan communities, rather than carrying out global measurements based on aggregate volumes of comments.
The main results:The main findings of the study reveal extremely concentrated audiences, with strong uses of Facebook> An audience extremely concentrated around a few clubs (OM, PSG, OL), fans who comment on several clubs are a minority (2.2%) > The common audiences of commentators reflect less the historical rivalries between clubs, than the nature of the content published. Supporters' communities are found in large geographical groups.> A minority of users (1%) generates a significant portion of the volume of comments (17%). These proportions vary greatly, the most active FC Metz supporters generate more than 1/3 of the club's comments.> The profiles of these fans demonstrate their attachment to the sport. The most active fans consume content directly linked to club calendars, while the less active ones interact with the most viral content.> More than one in two mentions remain unanswered. This is a significant “loss of profit” for clubs, where 17% of users are inactive on average.> The use of emojis or mentions is very concentrated. 80% of commentators publish rationally and solitary.
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Ligue 1 on Facebook - Analysis of comments of The Metrics Factory
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