There’s no doubt that traffic on Twitter and Facebook has been very heavy during the FIFA World Cup. Twitter even set a new record of 3,283 Tweets per second during the recent Japan vs Denmark game. That beat the previous record at the close of the LA Lakers’ win over the Boston Celtics in June. That’s some feat, considering that football (or soccer) isn’t the most popular sport in the U.S., and Twitter has a large U.S. user base.
I wonder if that record was surpassed again last night (Australian time) when England quite obviously scored a goal against traditional rivals Germany, but the referee didn’t pick it up? Everybody around the world watching on TV and those tweeting with each other certainly noticed. I know I tweeted about it. I’m sure there was also quite a bit of social media debate going on as to whether football should finally install video refereeing within the goal area!
Peter Blackshaw, an executive from TV and web monitoring firm Nielsen, has recently noted that social media activity during the World Cup is outpacing that seen during the Olympic Games, Super Bowl and Academy Awards, which is causing advertisers to want to get more involved. Indeed, according to Coca-Cola’s Carol Krus, Coca-Cola’s Promoted Trend on Twitter, which ran during World Cup matches and was only the second such trend, achieved 86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6%, for whatever that’s worth.
The World Cup’s massive global TV audience in certainly a big factor in the success of the World Cup in social media. Not many people would be tweeting about it if they weren’t watching it on TV or via web video streams at the same time. Football is a spectator sport, perhaps the biggest in the world, and that’s being reflected in social media.
For the first time during a World Cup, fans have been able to swap views on favourite teams and games in real-time and in a big way, thanks to social media. During the last world Cup final in 2006 in France, the worldwide TV audience for the final game was estimated to be 715 million viewers, but Twitter was only just beginning and Facebook only had around 12 million users.
With this sort of probable TV number on the table, it’s no wonder Twitter decided to get involved with its own official World Cup pages and hashtags. Smart move, if only they could keep the service running during the peak traffic periods. Depending on which teams are in the final game of the World Cup, it’s shaping up to be a combined TV and social media blockbuster.
Twitter’s official World Cup 2010 pages
