In July 2022, “Club Atlético Talleres de Córdoba” surpassed Argentine clubs with larger memberships in views of content published on the TikTok platform. This attracted the attention of many digital statistics media outlets, particularly the Talleres account on Twitter, which posted statistics on the 5 most popular clubs on TikTok and thanked its fans.

This leads us to ask: What causes Talleres' popularity? Does the tone of the message help Talleres make its content go viral? What main differences can be found between Talleres' content and that of the other clubs? Is there any detail that recurs across the different cases of virality?

As an introduction, social networks are a major tool for the communication and promotion of people and brands. The use of social networking sites as fast and viable tools for promoting brands is becoming an area of interest.(1)

On these platforms, people can communicate, form groups in different ways, and interact digitally through different devices.

As Van Dijck (2) states, “It does not imply that we are increasingly connected in networks and to the network, but rather that the network becomes a way of structuring an unprecedented form of being with others and produces a ‘connected sociality’.”

In this way, society becomes involved in creating digital spaces where individuals connect virtually and form groups of various kinds.

Following the Dutch author's argument, we can understand that different networks contain algorithms represented in simple forms, such as the “like” button, which encodes data about users' preferences. These data are highly valuable to different media because they delimit different forms of “sociality.”(2)

These social networks can take different forms. First, there are “social networking sites,” or SNSs, whose main objective is interpersonal contact and the creation of connections. Second, there are sites devoted to “user-generated content,” or UGC, which are used as tools that encourage content creation, whether professional or amateur. A subcategory of these may be trading and marketing sites, or TMSs, such as Amazon and MercadoLibre. Finally, there are play and game sites, or PGSs.(2)

This study focuses on the second type because it addresses the “TikTok” application and its relationship with the virality of content created by brands.

First, it is necessary to define virality:

Virality applied to the Internet can be defined as the behavior acquired by content published online through a social network or content-sharing platform whereby, conditioned by elements external and intrinsic to the content that may be predictable and/or random, it achieves an impact greater than the sender's expectations and greater than would be expected from its form or content, reflected in a notable sharing history that results in a number of views exceeding that of similar content.(3)

We therefore understand virality as a process in which content is taken up by a series of recipients who share it and generate more views than similar content.

Thus, content marketing can be described as any marketing activity that involves creating and disseminating content through a medium in order to acquire or retain consumers.(4)

John Ho et al.(5) add that content marketing creates opportunities for consumer participation and gives consumers the option to share within social network spaces, something that advertising alone could not achieve.

Accordingly, digital content marketing can be defined as cost-effective branded content that facilitates value, relevance, and consumer engagement.(6,7,8)

At the intersection of these concepts is viral marketing, an innovative marketing strategy used to reach a large number of consumers rapidly.(1)

Viral marketing disguises advertising and uses people's contact networks as its distribution channel. It appeals to the audience's interest in sharing content and uses distribution media that the advertiser does not need to own.(9)

In marketing, everything must be done with a purpose. To facilitate the path to success, that goal must be measurable and clearly defined through a series of objectives.

According to 1 study, there are also 8 valid objectives in content marketing. These include building a relationship based on trust, generating leads, solving audience problems, overcoming fears and objections, creating a need for the product, building loyalty among current customers, product testing, and building an audience.

In all communication there are 3 types of objectives: instrumental, which resolves a situation produced by communicative exchange; interpersonal, which establishes or maintains the relationship among participants; and identifying, which projects a particular image of the participants.(10)

We consider it important to emphasize this last objective. Boyd (11) and Bumgarner (12) determined that impression management, understood as the totality of conscious and unconscious actions we take to influence how others perceive us, and identity expression, which can be understood as the way we present ourselves, are highly important motivators for social media use. In addition, 1 study found that people were motivated by opportunities to attribute qualities and achievements to themselves.

Thus, we can understand that personal identity provides a strong motivation reflected in self-representation, self-expression, and satisfaction through self-attributed achievements and qualities.

According to Muntinga et al.(13), being represented refers to people contributing to brand-related content in order to show others an image of their personality; that is, they want others to associate them with that specific brand/product. Following these authors, self-expression represents the more emotional side, in which the brand expresses and shapes a person's identity or personality. Self-attribution of achievements denotes contribution to brand-related content in order to receive recognition from other members and thereby validate oneself.

Another concept to define is engagement. For Calder et al.(14), it is a multilevel and multidimensional construct that emerges from thoughts and feelings about 1 or more enriching experiences involved in achieving a personal goal. These authors conducted 3 studies in which they identified 5 categories of experiences that may constitute engagement: interaction, transportation, discovery, identity, and civic orientation. In this study, the term engagement will be used from the perspective of the interaction experience, understood as connection with others.

To add another perspective, according to Sheinbaum (15), engagement is a concept originating in psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior. Following Algesheimer et al.(16), from a community perspective, engagement represents a consumer's intrinsic motivation to interact and cooperate with other members of the community. For the same author, consumer engagement is therefore behavior affected by motivations.

Thus, by recognizing the potential of freely distributed content, marketing agents can create highly engaging advertising content that can expand its potential reach in a more credible and less expensive way than traditional media.(17)

As Tang (18) argues, social media advertising has proven more effective than conventional online advertising because of the rapid growth of these networks. In this way, advertising can spread through “reposts” or “shares,” or, in other words, it can be shared among users.

According to Botha et al.(19), the central element that causes a message to ignite the spark of virality is the emotion that the content generates in the audience. In the 90s, major advances in the study of emotions were made by neuroscientists Damasio (20) and LeDoux (21). The influence of this work has led to the understanding that emotions play an essential role in rational thought and behavior.(19)

Another key factor in user behavior on social networks is the influence of temporal context. User behavior is affected by 2 factors: the user's intrinsic interest, which is normally stable, and the attention of the general public, which changes over time. The latter, considered during a specific period, is the “temporal context.”(22)

These factors have different degrees of influence across different social networks. For example, a news program is a type of content that is heavily affected by temporal context, whereas the decision to choose a book or a movie is not.

Based on the definition of these concepts, a UGC application or site such as “TikTok” allows brands to generate valuable content for their audiences while pursuing different marketing and communication objectives, generating engagement, appealing to different behavioral influencers, and “going viral.”

Sports clubs, or more specifically Argentine football teams, also seek to generate valuable content for their fans on this application. As Geurin (23) states, athletes use social networks to share their daily lives, connect with fans, obtain sponsors, and promote themselves; a football team, understood as a group of athletes, can do the same. Thus, following the author's argument, social media account management strategies represent a key component of football clubs' identity.

According to official data from the Asociación del Fútbol Argentino (24) presented in the report published on February 17, 2022, the clubs with the largest number of registered members are, first, Club Atlético Boca Juniors (239 701 members), followed by Club Atlético River Plate (159 549 members), Club Atlético

Independiente (99 733 members), Racing Club (71 104 members), Club Atlético Newell’s Old Boys (67 993 members), Club Atlético San Lorenzo (56 911 members), Club Atlético Rosario Central (56 775 members), and, finally among those listed, Club Atlético Talleres de Córdoba (40 138 members).

Taking this into account, the July 2022 report by “LPF Data,” the official social media reporting entity of the Liga Profesional de Fútbol (Argentine League), shows that Club Atlético Talleres de Córdoba has greater engagement than clubs with more members, such as Racing, Newell’s, San Lorenzo, and Independiente.

Having presented this background, the objectives proposed for this study can now be defined.

The general objective is to understand the cause of the popularity of content from a club with fewer members compared with clubs that have a larger membership.

The specific objectives are to identify 10 popular posts from the Talleres account during July 2022 together with their metrics, and 8 posts from the accounts of clubs with larger memberships that are comparable with the selected posts.

To analyze which aspects help this content go viral.

To specify the main elements of these viral messages and define a pattern.

After analyzing the 10 most viral posts from Club Atlético Talleres on TikTok during July 2022 and 8 posts from the accounts of Club Atlético Independiente, Club Atlético Newell’s Old Boys, Racing Club, and Club Atlético San Lorenzo (2 from each), the following results can be reported:

In this study, we set out to determine the cause of Club Atlético Talleres' popularity on TikTok compared with clubs that have larger memberships, since it is unusual for a club with fewer members, supporters, or followers to be more popular than clubs with a larger following.

First, it is necessary to recall the objectives of this study in order to identify a pattern within Talleres' messages or posts that generates this popularity.

First, we see that Club Atlético Talleres has a stronger presence on TikTok, which made it easy to select popular posts from its account. In contrast, the clubs used for comparison had a smaller presence, requiring smaller samples or leaving no choice of posts, as in the case of Club Atlético Independiente.

We then understood that the audiences of the different accounts are similar but not identical. Although all of them address football fans, not all messages target this general audience; rather, they target a more specific audience associated with each club.

Unlike the other clubs, Talleres uploads more content that may be valuable to supporters from an emotional and personal perspective, such as memorable moments from the past, videos of supporters with whom they identify, or memorable plays from matches taking place during that month. We understand this as a visible pattern in the content, unlike the other clubs, which upload less content and therefore lose some of the sense of closeness to different events.

Although it does not emerge directly from the analysis, we can also interpret the smaller number of clubs in the city of Córdoba as a potentially fundamental factor when discussing a sense of belonging. This differs from clubs in the province of Buenos Aires or the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, where there are more clubs with which the public might identify.

Figure 16. Map of Argentine first- and second-division clubs by province

Note: this image represents the difference in the number of clubs in Córdoba compared with the provinces of Santa Fe and Buenos Aires.

To continue, we return to a question raised in the Introduction: is it the tone of the message that helps Talleres make its content go viral? Initially, it can be said that all clubs use the same tone when communicating their messages. However, after conducting the research required for this study, it is possible to see that Talleres seeks to communicate its messages in a more personal and approachable way, attempting to evoke different emotions in viewers and taking into account supporters' need to identify with the club. It shows plays from inside the field, goals from behind the goalposts, and more “private” moments such as training sessions and medical examinations from a closer perspective. This differs from the other clubs, which repost television broadcasts or use more distant points of view, making it more difficult for supporters to identify with the team or making them feel external to it.

Figure 17. Private moment during training. “Medical Training” (01) - Club Atlético Talleres de Córdoba

Returning to Van Dijck's (2) argument, Talleres appears highly conscious of creating these “connected socialities,” with a very clear objective of building loyalty among current customers or supporters. By contrast, the other clubs may lose sight of this main objective to some extent by uploading content that is less attractive to their own supporters.

The importance to Talleres supporters of qualifying for the quarterfinals of the 2022 Copa Conmebol Libertadores, a prestigious international competition, or the club's performance in the Copa Argentina, a national tournament involving clubs from different divisions of Argentine football, could also be discussed. This illustrates Picazo Sánchez's (3) definition of virality and helps us understand that external factors may have contributed to the virality of the content or to supporters' engagement with the club's content.

In this sense, it can be assumed that supporters' attitudes toward the club were predominantly, if not entirely, positive, thereby also affecting the number of views, comments, likes, and willingness to consume content uploaded by the Córdoba club's official accounts. We believe these external factors are reflected in higher engagement compared with similar content from other clubs that were not experiencing the same circumstances. For example, none of the clubs used for comparison had qualified for the Copa Conmebol Libertadores.

Figure 18. Teams qualified for the 2022 Libertadores

Given this information, together with the Córdoba team's strong performance in that competition and its advancement to the quarterfinals, supporters were probably satisfied and expressed this on social networks by liking, commenting on, and sharing content related to the event and material uploaded between matches. In some way, the “temporal context” may have affected supporters'/viewers' interest in seeing what was happening on match days and during training sessions.

In the videos analyzed, many sponsor brands for each club can be seen, whether on jerseys, on the balls used, or in the stadiums themselves. This leads us to believe that what we previously paraphrased from Geurin (21) is clear: football clubs use social networks as “showcases” to establish these connections with supporters and with sponsors, which appear in a manner similar to “product placement” in most situations. In addition to building loyalty with partner brands, this is highly attractive to new sponsors, who, if they see a large audience on the club's social networks, will want to invest in the club in order to gain exposure.

Figure 19. Advertising on the field. “Goal” (17) - Club Atlético San Lorenzo

Note: this image shows the different advertisements for Sica, La Nueva, FusioGas, Coca Cola, and Flecha Bus.

Because the sample was limited, the results were also limited. It would have been beneficial for this study if all the clubs analyzed had uploaded the same number of posts during July 2022, allowing them to be analyzed more equitably.

As a strength, we believe the results of this study can be used by other clubs or sports brands because, although the audience is highly varied, it has the same requirements or expects the same things from different clubs or brands.(28)

We believe it would be appropriate to continue studying this topic and add other clubs with both larger and smaller numbers of active members in order to compare the results of a more extensive study with those obtained here and thereby determine whether the findings of this study are truly replicable in other clubs.

The Córdoba club appeals to supporters' feelings, together with good timing when uploading content, using trending audio or music, allowing viewers to enter the club itself, making them participants in training sessions and what happens during them, giving them a space on social networks, and showing pride in them. In addition, the amount of content uploaded and the consistency with which it was posted may also have contributed positively.

In conclusion, it can be said that the club achieving the greatest impact and popularity is the one that makes the greatest effort to build loyalty among its supporters by appealing to their emotions, uploading content that may be valuable to them, aligning with the current “temporal context,” and reminding supporters that they are also part of the club or even the most important link giving life and meaning to it as a sports institution.