By Nick Harris

14 September 2010

Manchester United’s official Facebook fan page has become the fastest growing of any sports team in the world, registering almost 2.4m fans within two months of being set up.

The club, relatively slow to embrace Facebook as a platform for interaction with supporters compared to some of their major rivals in England and Europe, opened their Facebook page on 14 July.

At some stage later today (Tuesday 14 September), and almost certainly within 24 hours, United’s Facebook page will overtake Liverpool’s in global popularity, making United the most followed Premier League on the web.

At 9.30am this morning, Liverpool’s page had 2,383,038 fans, compared to United’s 2,377,055, leaving United 6,000 fans behind.

At the time of writing (just after 2pm on 14 September), United have 2,383,745 fans, and Liverpool 2,387,661, leaving United fewer than 4,000 fans behind.

The real time updated totals at any time can be checked at the Facebook pages themselves, with United’s linked here, and Liverpool’s linked here.

Liverpool, pioneers in a lot of new technologies over the decades, including web-based interaction, set up their page in March 2009, reaching 300,000 fans within four months.

United’s Facebook fanbase is still growing at approaching 1m fans per month. “This underlines our global fanbase,” said a spokesman for the club. “Any look at the extent of our support reveals there are United fans everywhere from Stretford to Shanghai, showing the strength of United’s appeal.”

Sportingintelligence has undertaken various pieces of research into Facebook popularity in sports since early August, to mark Facebook reaching 500 million users, equivalent to one in nine of all adults in the world.

We first looked at sports teams’ popularity on Facebook at the start of August. That research is linked here, but please note that this market is dynamic and huge changes can and do occur over short periods. Regularly updated figures on the world’s most popular sports teams on Facebook (and other social networks) can be found here at famecount.com, the social media statistics specialists (tallies updated daily).

10pm update: United overtook Liverpool this evening and are now, and will probably remain, the most popular Premier League team on Facebook.

.

More stories mentioning United

More on Facebook trends in sport

Sportingintelligence home page

.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Do you watch Premier League football anywhere outside England? Join our unique research project

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *