🏆🎥⚽️ A Social Video Victory For BT Sport 🏆🎥⚽️
tl;dr BT Sport generated a 1730% increase in interactions compared to all time on their Twitter social video content around FC Barcelona’s historic win last night 👏🏅🔥. The Drum have offered their own take on this in response here.
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‘Grown men were crying’ 😂 started an article last night from BBC Sport after the historic victory by FC Barcelona vs PSG in the UEFA Champions League.
No club had ever reversed a 4–0 deficit, until now.
Below we have taken a trip back through the social video time machine and brought to you all the video content posted by BT Sport Football last night. 👏👏👏 all round for their use of short, quick, reactive content in GIFs and short videos that captured the pre-match build up, behind the scenes excitement from the pundits, key moments from the game and the raw emotion felt around the world 🏆🎥⚽️. What a 90 minutes of football!
The 21 @btsportfootball Twitter videos posted at the time of writing have generated 45,380 interactions, averaging 2160 interactions per video/GIF. The all time average engagement for @btsportfootball is 118 interactions. Therefore the Barcelona vs PSG video content series has seen a 1730% increase in interactions versus all previous content🏅🏆💵.
Much has been written about BT Sport spending £1.2bn to secure the exclusive Champions League rights. Jake Humphrey however puts a fresh take on why spending three times what was spent by Sky and ITV until the 2014–15 season was worth it with the coverage of one game alone.
Jake described the game between FC Barcelona and PSG as a priceless experience which will be remembered forever. It really was a money can’t buy moment, to be there will have been pretty special.
The scene was set for an upset before the game with the BT Sport Football account on Twitter producing a 36 second video recap of some of the greatest upsets in recent years during lunch time before the game in the evening.
The hype was building even more when a 48 second video showing all the goals of the first leg was posted towards the end of the day, as a short recap hours before the second leg was set to kick off.
Less than an hour later, the pundits had their say with only Rio Ferdinand thinking it wasn’t going to happen for FC Barcelona.
Rio did want to rub his hands together with popcorn though if they scored an early goal (which they did). Reports of him keeping to his word remain unconfirmed 🍿🍿🍿.
Messi scored five back in 2012, was it to happen again…? ⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️
Before a ball was kicked at 7.45pm BT Sport Football had already put out all of the above video content (along with numerous photo only updates)
Using GIFs also of funny moments was a smart move to sweat their content assets even further, here’s Rio getting his popcorn out! BT Sport Football re-used this asset again when Barcelona were 3–0 up and because of the reactive nature and tapping in to the moment this saw 6x more retweets and approaching 4x more likes than the previous posting of the GIF below.
Culminating in the moment when the comeback was complete at 9.46pm. This 27 second video was retweeted over 10,000 times 🙌👌👏.
With an almost instant GIF posting of the manager’s reaction six minutes later.
Rio who doubted it happening initially was throwing his popcorn everywhere!
The excitement and emotion behind the scenes was awesome to see how much it meant to them.
“If you weren’t off the couch you don’t love football!”
Keeping the excitement going today, the below was posted at 7.30am in the morning UK time, which would have been timed for people to watch as they got up and on their commute to work if they missed the result and for other timezones.
Where’s Michael Owen off to?
They sweated the same asset further and changed the message to be “Never doubted you (Rio did 😂) #wedidit.
The sheer volume of video content posted by BT Sport showed that this was a real social video victory and owning the occasion with a far greater rich media output than Sky Sports as a comparison.
This was a clear victory for BT Sport and a historic moment for FC Barcelona. BT Sport will be hoping that there will many more magic moments as the value of social video increases with every passing season.
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