Photo graphic ©Facebook 2014
World Cup 2014 is already a week over, but there’s still buzz about the record-breaking, social media numbers the major sporting event generated. From the opening samba number by J-Lo, to the many mug shots of Neymar, and finally the cup-lifting Mario Götze, this World Cup saw huge increases in hashtags (some quite creative), photos (everyone saw the images of poverty in Brazil), comments, videos and vines than any other sports event before it. And during the final between Argentina and Germany, there was a whopping 280 million Facebook interactions, which bypassed the last largest of 35 million for the 2013 Super Bowl. A record 32.1 million tweets were sent during the game, with 618,725 tweets per minute being the highest for any sporting event.
An enormous amount of the activity and numbers surprisingly came from the U.S. You know, the country that has not yet embraced soccer the way the rest of the world has. Tell that to ESPN. They saw viewership of the 64 World Cup matches increase by 39 percent compared to the 2010 tournament. And while Americans were watching, we were all over social media. According to Ad Age, we were more engaged in World Cup social media than both football mad countries Brazil and Great Britain.
I followed practically every member of the US Men’s National Team on Twitter and Instagram and loved seeing their tweets and selfies. How great was coach Jürgen Klinsmann’s note encouraging our bosses to give us the afternoon off to watch the Germany/USA match? Social activity helps bring fans closer to the teams and players, and that in turn is engaging a new generation of world football fans. US captain, Clint Dempsey’s goal that gave the US a 2-1 lead against Portugal received 304,603 tweets per minute.
Sponsors made out quite well also, with various creative uses of social media. Would you believe Adidas had more than three million followers for the Twitter account of the official World Cup ball? Yes, you read that correctly, the ball. Coca-Cola had a successful World Cup campaign too, reaching 85 million Facebook fans. Even new comers, and one of my favs, Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, scored well with their video pulling in more than 19 million views and several thousand comments on YouTube.
The likely increase in all of this digital activity is ease of access thanks to smartphones and tablets. When you can plug in from anywhere, people from everywhere connect. When you stop and think about it, it is quite astounding how instantly folks who are worlds apart can interact. And during the World Cup we became a giant, tribal planet.
So while Germany was crowned world football’s greatest for the fourth time, history was also made by fans all over the globe, as the 2014 World Cup final was the most discussed sports event ever on social media.
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There is a very cool image of tweets captured in real time during the Germany vs. Argentina final. Just watch the light show explode at the moment Mario Götze scores his goal. (World Cup real-time tweets)
On the Ball 