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- Formula 1 Fan Engagement and Social Media: Part One
Formula 1 Fan Engagement and Social Media: Part One
Let's start diving into how Formula 1 teams are using their social media accounts
Georgia Carroll
June 09, 2025
Hi friends!
Over the past fifteen months, I’ve looked at a lot of different elements of Formula 1 fan engagement. One area I haven’t explored in depth, however, is social media. While I’ve looked at social media accessibility, driver fan club marketing and “secondary” social accounts, team social media has remained a “to be explored at a later date”.
There’s two reasons why I haven’t prioritised exploring team social media use:
Social media is the most commonly discussed area of sports marketing and the most public way to explore fan engagement. And that means a lot has already been said and is being said. When I started this project I thought it would be interesting to dive into some of the less commonly analysed touch-points to see what new information I could bring to the table.
Time. It takes a lot of time and effort to collect data from ten teams across half a dozen platforms. As I’ll discuss a bit further down in my data section, due to my (lack of) budget and ethical concerns around AI (and my lack of coding ability!), I do all of my research manually. Trying to keep on top of everything posted on social from a different timezone and while I have a full-time job is extremely time-consuming, and I had to find space in my schedule where I knew I could spend a month fully focused on the topic.
But I finally found that time, and now I’m here with a three-part series exploring how fans engage with F1 team social media accounts. Here’s what you can expect:
Part One: Overview: The current social landscape. Who is posting where, to how many followers, and does their content differ between platforms?
Part Two: WhatsApp and Instagram Broadcast Channels: Which teams are attempting to reach fans via chat feeds, how exclusive is the content, and are they maximising the potential of being in their fans’ DMs?
Part Three: The “adminification” of F1 Social Media: Hey bestie! How are teams leaning in to using a first-person “admin” persona, does it carry across platforms, and are fans thinking it’s cool or cringe.
Jump to:
Some quick notes on data and methodology
Timing:
The posts for the overview cross-posting comparison were taken from the three days between the end of the Monaco Grand Prix and the start of the Spanish Grand Prix, a date range of May 26th - 28th 2025.
The posts for the accessibility check were taken from the Spanish Grand Prix weekend, focusing on content shared on Saturday 31st May and Sunday 1st June 2025.
Data:
As with all of my research for this project, I manually collect and analyse content using good old-fashioned screenshots, thematic analysis, and observation. No AI is used at any stage, partially due to my ethical concerns, and partially because I grew to enjoy manual data collection and revision during my PhD. Any errors are therefore 100% human and my own.
When considering accessibility, unlike my previous full analyses, this is a simple snapshot that looked at Threads and Twitter for alt text usage (as they have easily visible alt text badges), and also looked at the use of third-party fonts on those platforms. But don’t worry, another full analysis will be coming later this season!
When analysing the data, I’ve created a couple of categories to classify Tone of Voice and Accessibility of teams:
Tone of Voice:
I’m going to discuss Tone of Voice a lot more in part three of this series when I explore the use of the “admin” persona. But for this overview, I’ve looked at two elements:
Are teams using a consistent tone of voice across all of their channels?
and
Where does the tone fit on a scale of “Hello corporate” to “Hey bestie” (with “hey corporate” in the middle).
Accessibility:
This part is pretty straightforward. Based on their use of alt text and fonts, teams fall into one of three categories when it comes to accessibility:
Always accessible
Inconsistently accessible
Inaccessible
Survey:
To assist me in writing these posts, I shared a survey asking interested fans to share their thoughts. I received 35 anonymous responses, with 34 including legitimate information. While we cannot take these as any kind of representative sample, they do contribute to our understanding of how fans engage with the accounts. The survey data will primarily be used in parts two and three of this series, but I’ve included a couple of snippets at the end of this post.
Overview
Before we can get into the nitty-gritty deep dives in parts two and three, we need to set the scene.
While I have included TikTok in the below lists of social platforms where teams have a presence, my focus for this series is not on short-form video content. Analysing how teams use video content across TikTok, Reels and Youtube is a wieldy topic that deserves its own focus, so it will be the subject of future posts.
When I refer to “total posts”, it is simply the number of posts shared between May 26th and 28th across X/Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Threads. “Unique posts” focuses on imagery rather than captions (although I will flag if a team has changed the caption accompanying an image across platforms), so it counts a post once per image/video, even if it has been shared across all platforms. These totals do not include replies (a topic that will be explored in part three).
The following counts below were accurate when I did a final check on 8th June 2025 (AEST).
Alpine
Total posts: 43
Unique posts: 21
Tone of voice: Hey bestie on Threads; Hey corporate on other channels
Accessibility: Inconsistently accessible. Alt text is used sporadically, however more images are shared without it than with. Third party fonts are also commonly featured.
Aston Martin
Total posts: 33
Unique posts: 17; 9 posts were shared exclusively to Twitter.
Tone of voice: Consistent; Hello corporate
Accessibility: Inconsistently accessible. One post across the weekend was shared with alt text.
Ferrari
Total posts: 38
Unique posts: 15
Tone of voice: Consistent; Hello corporate
Accessibility: Inaccessible
Haas
Total posts: 54
Unique posts: 15
Tone of voice: Consistent; Hey corporate
Accessibility: Inaccessible
McLaren
Total posts: 71
Unique posts: 24, however captions were also changed across platforms
Tone of voice: Differs between channels; Hey corporate to hey bestie
Accessibility: Inaccessible
Mercedes
Total posts: 67
Unique posts: 24
Tone of voice: Consistent; Hey corporate
Accessibility: Accessible
Red Bull
Total posts: 63
Unique posts: 47. The highest rate of unique posts on the grid. While cross-posting occurred, unique content was shared on Twitter, Threads and Facebook.
Tone of voice: Hey bestie on Threads; Hey corporate on other channels
Accessibility: Inconsistently accessible. Most posts include alt text, but it is missing from sporadic images. Third-party fonts are also occasionally used.
Sauber
Total posts: 17
Unique posts: 6
Tone of voice: Consistent; Hey corporate
Accessibility: Inaccessible
VCARB
Total posts: 33
Unique posts: 20 - content cross-posted on Instagram and Facebook but Twitter and Threads had a higher rate of unique content.
Tone of voice: Consistent; Hey bestie
Accessibility: Inaccessible
Williams
Total posts: 69
Unique posts: 22
Tone of voice: Consistent; Hey corporate
Accessibility: Inaccessible
Final thoughts
Most teams cross-post inaccessible content using a semi-corporate tone of voice. Threads is the most common platform for teams to experiment with their tone of voice and content, as will be explored in part three, and there is still a high rate of Twitter-exclusive posts.
It makes sense that a lot of content is directly cross-posted across Meta platforms, and it was rare for a team to post to Instagram and not Facebook, and vice versa. The few times we did see this, it was often a collaboration post or partnership on Instagram that was specific to the platform.
An example of a partnership post that only appeared on Ferrari’s Instagram
I do have a full breakdown of the exact ways teams are cross-posting and using the platforms in different ways, but it took me a lot of time so I’m going to save it for inclusion in my (potentially paywalled) mid-season report.
From the survey
As I noted earlier, I’ll primarily be using the data I collected in my survey for parts two and three of this series. However, I have included three quick bites that fit into my overview theme below. Deeper dives into data such as this will also be included in my mid-season report.