Richard Arnold, group managing director of Manchester United, is not a man who readily makes himself available to press or public. Yesterday at the Web Summit in Dublin, he himself almost boasted that “the business side of what Manchester United do is somewhat of a secret”.

Richard Arnold, group managing director of Manchester United, is not a man who readily makes himself available to press or public. Yesterday at the Web Summit in Dublin, he himself almost boasted that “the business side of what Manchester United do is somewhat of a secret”.

So for the conference, a 22,000-delegate juggernaut dedicated to all things internet, to have secured Arnold as a speaker was impressive. It was perhaps also a measure of the pride in which Manchester United takes in its own digital output.

Arnold was given just over 15 minutes to present to an audience used to a verbal and conceptual diet of start-ups, cloud technology, and AI systems. He chose to explain how Manchester United had gone about building itself into one of the most consumed digital media entities in the world, with the “number one and fastest growing Facebook site”, and the “biggest website in the world”.

An accountant by trade, Arnold joined the Premier League side in 2007 as commercial director. Pioneering United’s regional sponsorship strategy, and driving the club’s crack sales force with what are rumoured to be some rather unorthodox techniques, Arnold’s success was quickly measured in revenue, and he was promoted to his current role in July 2013. He has continued to excel, with United’s latest financial results showing a 24.1 per cent rise in commercial revenues over the last year to UK£189.3 million.

During his presentation yesterday, though showing signs of nerves, it was at least clear that Arnold positions Manchester United’s media reach at the core of his commercial pitches.

A Kantar survey carried out for United in 2012 that indicated the club had 659 million fans around the world has been mocked by the public and questioned by the press, but that figure sits at the centre of Arnold’s assertions about the club’s reach.

“That's like two Americas where everybody follows Manchester United,” he said yesterday. “To put that in context, the new pope was announced the same day that Sir Alex Ferguson announced his retirement and we trended number one on Twitter.

"In terms of our digital media channels, we're directly in touch with 120 million fans"

“In terms of our digital media channels, we're directly in touch with 120 million fans. 60 million of those via Facebook. We're engaging with 35 million of that 60 million every month. 38 million - some of the old gits like me - that we're in touch with via email, mobile etc with a comparatively small overlap. And then we've got nascent social media channels.

“Direct digital media engagement is at the core of what we do and everything that's important to Manchester United off the pitch going forward.”

Facebook, Arnold says, was a testbed for Manchester United. Launching in 2010 with what he describes as a “crawl, walk, run approach”, the club Facebook page allowed United to interact with fans, get instant and measurable feedback, and come to the conclusion that “there is very much an optimal point of engagement in how frequently [fans] want to hear from you.”

Two and half years after the Facebook launch, United branched out to other channels: Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, and crucially given United’s claim to have 110 million Chinese fans, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo in China.

“It's a big pond that we operate in, so how do we translate that into engagement?” asked Arnold rhetorically. “243 countries in the world where we're getting fans engaging with us. 264 tweets a minute, 400,000 a day about or to Manchester United, and 12 million posts that our fans are generating a month - that's heavily active.

“Fan engagement underpins everything we do. It drives sponsorship integration, which is a huge source of funds for us; content distribution; database expansion - the 40 million people we're in touch with ourselves over and above our social media platforms - and product sales.”

"Everything we do is aimed at consumable chunks of content that engage with the fans as they move round on the go"

Arnold puts United’s success in engaging its fanbase down to a simple and disciplined five-step strategy:

1. Localisation - United have journalists, “content creators”, operating in 18 languages in over 240 countries around the world. Those content creators generate about 3,000 social posts a month. Content has to be “culturally appropriate” and inoffensive.

2. Digestible - Content has to be “easy to receive and easy to pass on”. As a consequence, United are an unashamedly “mobile-first” media organisation. “Everything we do is aimed at consumable chunks of content that engage with the fans as they move round on the go.”

3. Be where the fans want to be - United have gone to social platforms that consumers are using; they have not sat back and waited for fans to come to the Facebook page.

4. Be authoritative – “Whilst there are some things we can't do like speculate about our players or gossip, we have to make sure that the things we can do be complete, be honest, be authoritative so that they keep the fans coming back to us as their media channel of choice.”

5. Measure – “Don’t just talk, listen. Measure what fans like to consume and adjust accordingly.”

"We are rarely the first onto any media platform"

“That engagement allows us to do things faster than anybody else,” Arnold said. “We are rarely the first onto any media platform. We seek to use the discipline, those rules - the five pillars - to ensure that when we go onto a platform in the right way that allows us to engage most intensely, and grow the fastest and have the best quality base of fans on that platform.

“To put that in context, it took us 401 days to reach three million followers on Twitter.”

Arnold supported his presentation with a series of sometimes remarkable slides. The ‘first to three million Twitter followers’ slide puts United well out in front of any other sports club. Arsenal, for example, took around 1,600 days to reach the three million mark.

Another slide showed what Arnold termed as the “media multiplier effect”. Every hour, Arnold said, there are 200 mainstream media news articles written about Manchester United. For every piece of information we generate,160 articles are written about it, and then about 14,000 people will generate tweets about every article or post that we generate.”

That multiplier effect has resulted in Manchester United’s media operation becoming the most engaging in the world. According to Arnold’s slides, there are more people talking about United everyday on the internet than the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona, the LA Lakers and Dallas Cowboys, even Justin Bieber and Rihanna.

If United were able to tap into analytics from every piece of Manchester United content uploaded to the internet every day, they’d undoubtedly arrive at a far more powerful number still than the 659 million fans that Kantar counted in 2012.

