July 1 – The 2014 World Cup continues to break records as it makes Facebook and Twitter history. The event has generated more activity on Facebook than any other event ever. There have been over 1 billion World Cup interactions, with more than 220 million people posting, liking or commenting their contributions to the tournament.
The record was surpassed on June 29, and with 2 weeks left of the tournament it is sure to set an impressive new standard to beat.
Brazil is at the centre of the online interest as their matches against Croatia and Chile generated the first and second most amount of activity respectively. The Chile game inspired 31 million people to have 75 million interactions, whilst the Croatia game mustered up 140 million interactions between 58 million people.
Similarly, the Brazilian players are leading the way in likes. 60% of the 20 most-liked comments by a World Cup player are the product of Neymar or David Luiz.
Facebook has a feed dedicated to the world cup, where team news, interviews, professionals’ opinions, posts and pictures are shared with those who are interested, which is helping to drum up the activity.
On Twitter, 16.3 million tweets were documented during Brazil’s first knockout round game against Chile, flipping the results of Facebook as this time the Croatia game finished in second with 12.2 million tweets, which is the most amount of tweets for a live event that the website has ever witnessed.
388,985 tweets a minute occurred in the dying moments of Chile’s campaign, making it a difficult environment for Gonzalo Jara to hide from his fatal miss.
Neymar’s popularity is in good condition on Twitter too as he was the most mentioned player during the game
Not all these tweets have been received with pleasure though. Delta airlines attempted to express its excitement for the USA’s victory over Ghana through Twitter by depicting the 2-1 scoreline with the 2 in front a backdrop of the Statue of Liberty and the 1 in front of a backdrop that had a giraffe present. The issue here being that giraffes don’t live in Ghana, causing embarrassment for Delta and subsequent accusations of racism from the more geographically astute.
In further contrast of the success of the USA team, its population ventured into controversial territory during their game against Germany. The word ‘Nazi”, or it’s plural form was present in 30,209 tweets, including retweets.
More recently KLM airlines celebrated a Dutch victory over Mexico by tweeting “Adios Amigos!” with an accompanying picture of a sign directing a man wearing a sombrero toward departures. This, too, resulted in apologies and tweet removals.
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