The new research by EIS and Virality in collaboration with AIP reveals the digital communication potential of volleyball players
The investigation by EIS and Virality continues among the most popular Italian sports to analyze their potential for digital communication. After the research on footballers, it’s the turn of volleyball and its reference category association, the Italian Volleyball Association.
An overall look makes us immediately understand that it is the individual athletes, male or female without distinction, who have a presence that is quantitatively and qualitatively more effective than the respective Clubs they belong to. Foreigners generally have an edge, guaranteed by the following brought by their countries of origin, but also the Italians, especially if protagonists of the recent triumphal rides of the Azzurre national teams, manage to reach interesting peaks. Clearly there are specificities that are worth investigating in detail.
To begin with, we find that the male category is dominant in various respects, starting with the average number of followers, which settles at around 71k followers against only 37k for the female category. Comparing the data relating to the teams, we note that the situation does not change: the Instagram profiles of the male rosters have an almost triple following of the female ones (about 87k vs 31k).
With the exception of Itas Trentino, all teams have at least one player with more followers than the team they belong to. In Padua, Ran Takahashi alone has about 1.1M followers (against the team’s 50k): the Japanese is a celebrity in his country of origin and the vast majority of his followers are fellow countrymen. Apart from the cases of Ivan Zaytzev (Lube Cucine Civitanova), Daniele Mazzone (Emma Villas Aubay Siena), Alessandro Michieletto (Itas Trentino) and Simone Giannelli (Sir Safety Susa Perugia) the remaining part of the teams in the men’s tournament has the most following player a foreigner, demonstrating that overseas volleyball stars have more followers. On this front, the situation does not change in the pink championship: apart from five clubs, all the other teams have a foreign player as the most popular player. Furthermore, in the women’s championship, all the clubs are beaten by at least one of their players in terms of number of followers, reconfirming that the public loves to follow the individual performers more than the teams as a whole. The athlete with the most followers overall is the Brazilian Rosamaria Montibeller, militant in the Busto Arsizio e-work, with a record following of 1.2M.
Observing the reference targets, we can see that the generation that most follows volleyball players (both male and female) is GenZ (18-24 years), while in the case of Clubs, the average age rises to Millennials (25-34 years).
Still in terms of audience, the male volleyball audience is found to be equally divided by gender, while the female one is very unbalanced in favor of men. The case of Daniele Mazzone (Emma Villas Aubay Siena) is emblematic, with a community that is 68% made up of women. For the Clubs, however, there is no alternative to the male audience, with the exception of Valsa Group Modena and Cucine Lube Civitanova, which have a slight majority of female followers, 56% and 53% respectively.
We can also note that it is the athletes who post more frequently on average. Beatrice Negretti (Vero Volley Milano) is the one who boasts the number of 10 publications every two weeks. In terms of frequency, however, it is the Clubs that dominate the rankings, especially those of SuperLega, which publish about 27 contents every 15 days.
From the observation of the average Engagement Rate of the players, compared to the same value of the teams, we can see how the former are clearly more engaging than the latter: 14.21% for volleyball players VS 3.04% for SuperLega teams and 10.1% for volleyball players VS 3.07% for the Women’s Volleyball League teams. This demonstrates once again how the storytelling of personal profiles is far more effective than that of impersonal subjects or brands, even if endowed, as in this case, with emotional and valuable contents.
Up to here the quantitative analysis of public data. Thanks to Virality, however, we can go further and draw up a special quality ranking. Through the weighted crossing of a series of values, Virality is in fact able to attribute a “score” to each monitored profile and from there draw up a ranking.
In this way we discover that there is no particular gap between individual athletes: for men the average score is 54.38, while for women it is 52.90. Going to compare the teams, the gap between the two categories is accentuated, the men’s ones have a value of 50.58 while the women’s 42.54.
The topics covered by volleyball players in their posts deserve a final insight, decidedly different between men and women. With the exception of sport and fashion, the true common denominators of all, among the interests of volleyball players, the family, entrepreneurship and gaming stand out; while for volleyball players we find beauty and pets.
“Read from the point of view of the protagonists, the world of volleyball proves to be quite uniform – comments Enrico Gelfi, founder of EIS – the visibility of male and female players deriving from the successes with the clubs and with the national teams, allows the fans to show their attention without major distinction between the sexes. Certainly there are exceptions, but even these are equally distributed by gender: if, for example, the men’s clubs win the quantitative challenge of the number of followers, then the leagues will take care of restoring the balance”.
