The 2023-24 season of the Basketball Champions League offered surprising storylines and ushered in innovation in European club basketball, not least with the introduction of the ASB GlassFloor at the Belgrade Final Four, but there is one predictable trend which the BCL and its participating clubs didn’t mind following for the eighth year in row.
Just as in each of the previous seven seasons, the digital outreach of the BCL continued to scale new heights. This still young league placed emphasis on its social media and digital presence since day one, and the Season 8 numbers demonstrate that this early commitment still translates into constant growth.
The total number of the league’s followers on social media platforms surpassed 2.64 million, with Instagram and TikTok achieving the biggest growth rates, both nearly 10 percent higher compared to the seventh season, albeit Facebook remains the most popular platform among BCL fans.
Total video views jumped to 58 million, up from 50 million last season, while total engagement, or else the sum of all interactions with a social media post, increased to 2.6 million from two million the year before.
The official website of the competition, championsleague.basketball, received about three million page views from the start of the season until the end of the Final Four, with users from Spain, Greece and Germany accounting for over 41 percent of the total visits while, interestingly, 5 percent of visitors were based in the United States, which was the top non-European country.
The clubs that compete in the BCL are of course the true beneficiaries of its digital growth, either directly or indirectly.
Tofas Bursa certainly experienced the biggest direct growth in Season 8, as their social media platforms following increased by an impressive 53 percent, including an eye-popping growth of over a thousand percent (1,300%) on Tik Tok.
Unicaja, the 2023-24 champions, saw their social media presence grow by 9 percent overall. This was fueled in large part by a 23 percent increase on their Instagram channel, where the Spanish led all 32 clubs that took part in Season 8.
Another club from the Iberian Peninsula, SL Benfica Lisbon, led the rankings when it came to X (twitter) growth, with a 16-percent rise of their followers on that platform.
The showpiece event of the season, the Belgrade Final Four, was also the pinnacle event of the year in terms of digital engagement, with total interactions surging by 26 percent compared to the 2023 tournament, to reach 721 thousand.
Season 9 of the BCL is set to tip off in the autumn, with the league aiming to continue building on this impressive trend.
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