By Mark Baber
June 10 – With just days to the start of the World Cup in Brazil, Twitter and YouTube and Facebook are challenging for the largest slice of the quickly growing social media pie, with Facebook laying claim to providing the “biggest stadium” of football fans.
According to a Financial Times report, which includes an interview with Facebook director of global accounts Will Platt-Higgins, Facebook reaches 500 million football fans. That figure would represent almost twice Twitter’s monthly active users.
According to Facebook itself, 48.9 million of those soccer fans are in the US whilst 13.2 million football fans are in the UK.
Platt-Higgins told the FT that Facebook’s strength is particularly in the mobile market where “for the first time in 2014, we, all of us, are carrying around a mobile stadium in our pockets, where you will be watching, learning scores, team sheets, changes, injuries, substitutes – all of it – and sharing it. That is a hugely compelling thing for a marketer.”
Twitter has already declared there have been more tweets about the 2014 World Cup, before a ball has been kicked, than for the entire tournament in 2010. Figures suggest up to 60% of UK viewers tweet whilst watching.
Tom Ramsden, global brand marketing director for Adidas football, was quoted as saying: “This will undoubtedly be the most social World Cup ever and probably the most social event in history.”
The brand response to the social media revolution includes Adidas spending more on digital marketing than TV ads.
For the 2010 World Cup just 20% of marketing spend was digital. The overall figure for digital marketing has now reached 23% so the total figure for the 2014 World Cup will be much higher, with newspapers suffering the biggest falls. Visa already allocates 30% on average to digital and Facebook’s capacity for targeted advertising makes that platform particularly attractive for the World Cup sponsor.
In the growing social media market, it remains to be seen which of the major platforms will capture the largest slice of the “second screen” market – with YouTube providing viral visual content, Facebook leveraging the biggest community of users and Twitter arguably providing the most compelling and immediate social interaction.
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