The Swiss national team in the social media check: Granit Xhaka is the leader

If you look at the fan numbers of our shakers, Xherdan Shaqiri is the clear winner with a total of 2.9 million Facebook and Instagram fans. The best social soccer score, however, comes from someone else: Granit Xhaka is more successful on the road than his colleague, with 2.5 million fans. But how is this success measured?

Various factors play a role here: The combination of the number of fans, posts and reactions of the followers provide information about the activity of the player and his community and result in the so-called engagement rate. If the content that Xhaka posts is boring, too promotional, or even irrelevant, it may be noticed, but not played with engagement passes. But if he hits the interest of his community with a post, he will be rewarded with many comments, shares and likes. So if the player has a close relationship with his fans and offers relevant content, they will stay close to him and bring their star to the top of the engagement rate.

A good example of this is Akanji and Mvogo, ranked 4th and 5th on our Social Soccer Score list. They have by far the smallest number of fans on Facebook, but their content appeals to the fanbase and gets them more engagement than their colleagues in relation to fan size.

The game makers on the social web

In addition to the engagement rate, other important indicators are also in focus, namely when it comes to influencing his fans and strengthening his own personal brand. Leader Xhaka is convincing all along the line. Large following, active management of the channels with content that is well received by the community. Behind the 14% of his community from Indonesia, we now suspect supporters of Arsenal FC. English soccer clubs are traditionally very popular in Asian countries.

In the case of Xerdan Shaqiri, for example, it is astonishing that he was able to build up "only" 100K fans in the UK after one year in the Premier League - in comparison to his last three stations in Italy, Germany and Switzerland, this is rather low for a social web-savvy league. Thus, the value of his personal brand should remain stable, especially in these countries, or increase the longer the World Cup lasts for the Swiss national team.

Stephan Lichtsteiner, on the other hand, has a very dominant personal brand in Italy. After seven years at Juventus Torino, 65 percent of his community comes from Italy. Meanwhile, only 2 percent follow him from Switzerland. It will be interesting to see how he manages to inspire people from the UK on the social web at his new employer Arsenal FC.

If we look at the relevance of footballers in terms of the age of social media users, it quickly becomes clear that the young target group in particular follows very actively. This trend can generally be observed among all Nati players.

There also seems to be a generational divide when it comes to the choice of social networks. The younger half of our soccer team no longer has an official page on Facebook. However, all of them, without exception, are represented on Instagram.

The Social Soccer Score

PRfact publishes - after the Social Athlete Score of the Swiss Olympic athletes - the Social Score of Swiss athletes for the second time. Currently, PRfact analyzed the Social Soccer Score of the Swiss Football Team. How is the Social Soccer Score calculated? First, the individual social media profiles (Facebook and Instagram) of the footballers were analyzed and evaluated, taking into account the number of fans and followers. PRfact also evaluated how active the players are on their profiles and how often they published posts in the last three months until the start of the World Cup. In addition, the activity of the fans was evaluated and an interaction rate was calculated for each account. For comparison purposes, these three key figures were then combined into a separate score, the Social Soccer Score (SSS).