A new Euro 2012 match day and it’s again time for a Facebook Engagement Check. Yesterday, Spain and Italy won their matches and moved to the quarterfinals. Today, two more top favorites are playing. The English national football team plays against the Euro hosts Ukraine. In the other Group D match the French team meets the already eliminated Swedish team.
Especially the first game between England and Ukraine is promising some tension. Just recently we compared the Facebook performance of the English team page on Facebook with the German Facebook page. But of course, the activity on the pages is currently very high, so the numbers are changing daily.
Fan Metrics For England And France – Facebook Engagement Check
The English page has currently more than 1.517 million fans, not only leading in front of France, whose fan page hast just over 629k fans, but also England is the number one of all Euro 2012 teams that have an official Facebook presence.
Facebook Fan Count And Change For The English National Football Team:
At first glance, this chart looks certainly unusual. On 24th May the English Facebook page added more than 85k fans at once. About the reasons for this extreme growth we can only speculate. On the one hand, it could have been a merging with another fan page or it was a day with very high advertising expenditures. 
Facebook Fan Count And Change For The French National Football Team:
The French page is presenting an ever-growing fan count. Especially since the start of the European Championship, the daily fan growth likewise increases by leaps and bounds. So, this really could be an indication for a great Facebook engagement.
People Talking About Rate For England And France – Facebook Engagement Check
The People Talking About This (PTAT) – Rate chart compares the people talking about value of a facebook page normalized by the number of fans. Here, as so often we see a contrary picture compared to the total fan number charts above. Not England, but France has the highest people talking about rate, which means that they have the highest engagement relative to their fan base. While the Facebook page of the French football team already skyrocketed just before the beginning of the Euro 2012, the English page came only gradually to the top.
The Most Successful Posts By England And France
Checking the Facebook interaction rate of England and France for the last 30 days, we can see an extremly distinctive peak for the French page on the 16th of June.
Therefore the wall post below was the most successful post for the French page within the last 30 days:
The highest interaction peak for England was on June 15th and is related to this highlighted wall posting:
Facebook Engagement Check – The Result
This Facebook Engagement Check once again shows that the number of fans does not decide who is going to be the winner. Despite significantly lower fan count, France is far ahead of England when in comes to fan interaction and People Talking About This – Rate.
