Dubai:- With 2022 FIA Formula One World Championship promising an action-packed season where scores will be settled and rivalries will be renewed, social media is abuzz with fans across the world talking about the sport, resulting in 305 per cent increase in the mentions of the event. This trend was highlighted by Meltwater, the world’s leading media monitoring & social media analytics provider, after tracking and analysing news and social media data in the region during the last seven days.

Meltwater stated that the social media buzz around the sport has picked up further as Jeddah Corniche Circuit hosted Formula 1 STC Saudi Arabian Grand Prix 2022 over the weekend. 

Ever since the world got to a standstill amid COVID-19 pandemic, there is no doubt that Formula 1 has been one of the few industries to experience a spike in its social media audience. The social media buzz around the sport highlights the emerging opportunity for Formula 1 in the expanding digital sports entertainment universe.

The success of Formula 1 STC Saudi Arabian Grand Prix 2022 is being attributed to the unlimited support that the sports sector enjoys from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud in line with the plans and goals of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030. This was the third FIA-sanctioned World Championship event that was organised in the Kingdom this year, firmly establishing Saudi Arabia as one of the finest destinations for motorsport fans in the region.

According to the data accessed by Meltwater, there has been an increase of 305 per cent with 700,000 total mentions and 100,000 mentions per day since the commencement of the sporting event.

It further states that the raw reactions and arguments during and after every Grand Prix are one of the factors that are drawing fans and new viewers into the racing sport. The tweet from the official twitter handle of Formula 1, announcing the win of Charles Leclerc in Bahrain Grand Prix 2022, reached 7 million internet users, and was retweeted 31,000 times. Another tweet, “Charles Leclerc takes pole in Bahrain! It’s pole position number 10 of his career” also reached 7 million users and was retweeted 24,000 times.

Zubair Timol, Vice President of Meltwater said: “After analysing the data, we have realised that the fan engagement increased during the opening week of F1 season. The engagement further rose during the STC Saudi Arabian Grand Prix 2022. The share of voice is split between pop culture references influenced by Netflix's popular ‘Drive To Survive’ and the racing performances across the weekend. F1 continues to grow its digital footprint across all of its social platforms, providing further commercial avenues for the sport."

Formula 1 is gradually turning into the most talked about event with various online creators dedicating their channels solely to the sport. These channels get to speak about every team and even have chats with viewers on various topics around the drivers and cars. The F1 World Championship has also been mentioned by blog including 174,000 times by ‘f1godfather.com’, 382 by timbreak.xyz, 230 by alldrivers.news, 205 by f1shot.com, 185 by italialife24.it, 176 by the servicenow.com, 174 by myf1newssite.wordpress, 157 by nomisec.com, 155 by abbeyfealegolfclub.com, and 142 by sportsspaces.online.

The official twitter handles of media houses across the world, with followers ranging between 10 million and 40 million, also tweeted about F1 season, adding to the fan engagement about the sporting event. The handles include @espn, @reuters, @detikcom, @ndtv, @saudinews50, @twittersports, @timesofindia, @cgtnofficial, @skysports, and @guardian.

Predicting the future:

Media monitoring tools can be beneficial to those interested in closely following financial market movements and hopefully profiting from them in the long run. Data from some social media sites, such as Twitter, is publicly available and can be collected and analysed to come up with real and usable insights.

The artificial intelligence components of media monitoring can then be used to identify and aggregate references and opinions on a particular topic. One of these tools is sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, which looks at whether sentiments are positive, negative, or neutral. The most common platforms for these discussions are Reddit and Twitter because speculation has a significant impact on public perception, and perception drives growth.

Add to this the looming attention recession and creating proactive and coherent cross-platform social engagement tools is imperative for driving F1 fandom into the digital-first media landscape of the future. So, F1 must build a resilient niche rather than a mainstream proposition to survive in an on-demand digital environment.

‘Drive to Survive’ seasons has placed F1 in pole position to achieve this. ‘Drive to Survive’ Wikipedia views increased by three times over the release weekend, crossing 11,000 views per day. F1 has reported that it was the largest growing sport in the digital space. In 2020, followers across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tiktok, Snapchat, and Twitch were up 36% to 35 million.

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