The 2014 FIFA World Cup has been trending on Twitter since days before the tournament started, and it’s almost impossible to log onto the social network and not see tweets about matches, players, highs and lows and much more. The wonderful and scary thing about modern social media, however, is that you can quantify exactly how popular things are.
So, exactly how much engagement around the World Cup has been going on on Twitter so far? Twitter has an excellent data mining department which regularly publishes stats, and here’s what they say about the football tournament so far.
The most tweeted match
Everbody has their eye on host country Brazil to see whether or not they can win the World Cup for the sixth time since 2002, but the lesser known under dogs have come out as formidable opponents lately. The match kept fans across the world on the edge of their seats during the Chile vs Brazil match on the 27th June, 16.4 million tweets were sent out during the match, making it not only the most tweeted World Cup match so far, but also the most tweeted real-time event of all time.
With 16.4 million Tweets, #BRA v #CHI is the most-discussed match of the #WorldCup so far pic.twitter.com/w0BJYz646s
— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) June 28, 2014
Two times more tweets than the London Olympics
A total of over 150 million tweets were sent out during the London Olympics back in 2012, but the World Cup has already garnered more 300 million tweets so far, with two more weeks left until the last match on 13th July.
The most seen tweet
This tweet sent out by France’s Mario Balotelli on 20th June was seen 17,185,016 times
The most tweeted hashflag
Many fans have been showing support for their favourite teams on Twitter using hashflags, which are flag icons of each nation that appear next to your tweet when you tweet the appropriately allocated hashtag. The #USA is the most tweeted hashflag so far with 6.02 million tweets, followed by the Brazil #BRA hashflag that has been tweetd 2 million times.
That may be the first time the USA has led anything anywhere in football.
Most mentioned players
Argentina’s Lionel Messi is the most mentioned player so far, Brazil’s Neymar comes in at number two and Luis Suarez at number three.
These were the most-mentioned players on Twitter during the #WorldCup group stage pic.twitter.com/V2V3o9sazU
— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) June 27, 2014
[Sources – Twitter Data, Mashable. Image – Shutterstock]