Case study on use of Social Media Marketing in four English football clubs – one from each league

Abstract In the footballing world, digital marketing has evolved a lot and has made football clubs prioritise social media marketing more than ever before. The aim of this thesis was to understand on a deeper level how social media marketing works and can be used effectively in four English football clubs, from the professional football league’s top tier to the bottom tier, i.e. Liverpool FC, Sheffield Wednesday, Wigan Athletic and Tranmere Rovers. The thesis provides an in-depth look at how each club uses social media in its marketing. The first part of the thesis sets out the research background and boundaries. The second part of the thesis covers the theoretical context. The usage of literature included books and internet-based sources. The theory includes aspects such as social media, related to marketing and marketing, related to communication. The empirical part consists of a case study using observations on the clubs’ usage of social media marketing during a particular period: 2020 for Facebook and Twitter and January-March 2021 for Instagram. The analysis was carried out by collecting from publicly available secondary sources, including articles, websites and a social media marketing analysis tool called Sotrender. Results indicated that the four case study clubs in general are using social media marketing actively and efficiently on all social media platforms. As expected, Liverpool FC were the most active on all platforms because they have more resources and a massive following compared to the other clubs. There were some differences between the clubs and the platforms, particularly in the posting frequency on Instagram. To conclude, the message of the content is coherent across the platforms but there is room for improvement in some aspects related to some of the platforms