On Wednesday, Zinedine Zidane's Real Madrid squad took down the Major League Soccer All-Star team in a 4-2 penalty kick shootout at Soldier Field in Chicago. Although the reigning La Liga champs ended their three-week preseason tour in the United States with some lackluster results, failing to score more than two goals in a game, they scored big with their social media audience in the United States.

Teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG, Juventus, Manchester United and Manchester City all took part in United States portion of the International Champions Cup as a tune up for the regular season. While in America, these clubs were able to engage with a starving fan base on social media that doesn't get the chance to see players like Lionel Messi, Neymar, Paul Pogba, Kevin De Bruyne, Gareth Bale, Karim Benzema and Marcelo on a regular basis. 

Real Madrid is at the forefront of developing and curating content on social media. In fact, according to Forbes, two of the 10 biggest sports hashtags used on Instagram last year were "#RealMadrid" and "#HalaMadrid." Terry Collins of CNET put together a great piece on how Los Merengues became a social media powerhouse and how they planned their preseason trip to the United States. Here's a snippet:

The club has such a strong presence on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, its social index value is worth about $1.7 billion (about half of the team's estimated $3.6 billion value), the highest in pro sports, said Kyle Nelson, CEO of MVPindex, a social measurement platform.  

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For its US exhibition tour, Real relies heavily on Instagram data to track its fans and pinpoint where they could have a "home field advantage," said Gayle. That may be why it's played matches in cities such as Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.    

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It's no mistake why Real Madrid played preseason games in California and Florida. Courtesy of Instagram/CNET

Again, you should check out the CNET story. There's a ton of great nuggets explaining how the club -- which has 51.4 million followers on Instagram -- came about picking venues for this summer's preseason tour in America and how it approaches its social media on a global scale, dealing with fan bases that speak various different languages.