/Thread/ On Friday a week ago, #ManchesterUnited has launched an official profile on the #TikTok social media platform. The growth of the digital age has made it almost compulsory for football clubs to indulge in new ways to keep in touch and reach out to their worldwide fanbase

It has taken a year longer than Liverpool and two more than Chelsea, but at last one of Asia’s most popular clubs launched on the continent’s favorite social media video sharing platform. Manchester need to earn the trust and attention of the next generation of soccer fans

Within a week of opening the account, the club already had over 2 million likes and is close to the limit of 400,000 followers. For Generation Z-those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s-it is not enough to only serve up the latest challenge or goal celebration,

you have to let them behind the curtain. Football has gone from people only seeing the 90 minutes players play on the pitch to being more about the game off. Especially Gen Zed and the younger audience, they watch less of the real game than they watch everything else

I'd estimate clubs are getting more engagement and views on their social media for behind the scenes than matches.
Once it’s established on a platform United knows how to plug a new channel successfully into an already sizable armory of marketing tools to aid the club’s numerous

commercial partners.

The biggest clubs in Europe have all employed the modern art of reaching out to fans via social media well, and have also made accounts on TikTok. In the space of two years, TikTok has become an important fan engagement tool for top-tier sports teams & leagues in the US & Europe

Working towards that very end, Manchester United are the latest club to launch their official TikTok account in an attempt to connect better with their audience. They joins Premier League rivals Liverpool, Man City and Arsenal on the platform while Barcelona, Bayern Munich,

AC Milan and Juventus are other football clubs to have a TikTok presence. Other sports entities to recently partner with TikTok include DAZN and the New York Yankees. The social media app also recently became the jersey sponsor of a FIFA esports team

Since TikTok is something that is mainly used by the younger generation, this move by Utd is a smart one if they are to lure international, as well as domestic fans into supporting the iconic club. With a focus on creativity and innovation, the club’s new TikTok channel @manutd

will pioneer fresh and unique ways of engaging with existing fans, while reaching out to a youth audience globally. @manutd will feature short-form video clips of the first team squad, Under-23s and Women's players, providing a never-before-seen perspective on the club for fans

around the world, with tailored content for each country giving fans the ultimate online experience. The partnership with the ByteDance-owned video app will see the PL club create exclusive augmented reality-supported (AR) content for its users as part of a new technology trial

Among the other content promised by the United account includes ‘hashtag challenges’ and short videos from the various squads at the club that make up the very essence of the app

TikTok has 800 million monthly active users worldwide, with 500 million based in China (Douyin). Consequently, it ranks 9th in the ranking of social networks by the number of users, ahead of well-known sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Snapchat

However, the video app is by far the most downloaded in recent years. It exceeded 2 billion downloads from the Apple Store and Google Play in 2020

In China, where TikTok is not active and where Man Utd have a large following, the club will be launching on Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, as part of a wider partnership with Bytedance. Man Utd became the first football club to reach 10M followers on Weibo earlier

this year, and will be looking to make up ground on current Douyin football leaders: Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Chelsea. Douyin has also agreed a two-year “Official Short Video Platform” with United’s local rivals Manchester City in a deal that began in August

The arrangement will see the Premier League side post exclusive shortform video content on the Douyin video platform, including interviews, match highlights and other club content, as well as launching local activations for fans in China

The club is hoping the partnership will further boost its engagement with Chinese digital audiences by allowing it to tap into Douyin's advanced analytics tools

TikTok may be more well-known globally, but Douyin still generates most of the revenue for the apps’ Beijing-based owner ByteDance. The mainland Chinese market accounted for 89% of the two apps’ combined revenue in May, followed by 6.2% from the US #SportBusiness #SportsMarketing