Managing Brand Presence through Social Media: the Case of Zenit Football Club

Due to the internet development and social platforms many companies use the Internet marketing within their promotion strategy. Moreover, day by day social media invent a brand new tools to promote products effectively. There is no exception even for sport clubs if they want to promote its club as a brand. For example, football clubs bring a huge income by supporting their fanbase, which, almost "lives" on the Internet. Research in this area could help sports brands to improve their promotion strategies. In this paper, we will consider the main factors that allow sports organizations to manage the characteristics of their brand with social networking tools. First of all, we consider the main issues of interaction with subscribers and followers on social networks and their impact on the effectiveness of the brand's promotion of the sports club. Secondly, the work also presents a statistical (including dispersion) and content analysis of the official VKontakte group, as well as features of promotion in different phases of life of the football club. As a subject for the analysis we consider the case of Zenit football club, because this club is one of the most popular in Russia. What is more, the club has world known players, which allows the PR department of the club to develop a brand promotion strategy all over the world. The analysis shows that the content of social networks "Zenit" in the period of seasons and off-season impact on content quality but does not influence popularity among subscribers.