Twitter dropped the ball at the beginning of the World Cup finals when it buckled under the weight of tweets in the build-up to the first match on 11 June.  It experienced a few outages and had to post an explanation on the technical difficulties which led to its poor performance.

But, as the competition got underway, momentum really built and records for online traffic were broken. For example, there were a record-breaking 3,283 tweets per second sent at the end of Japan’s victory over Denmark.  Fan enthusiasm wasn’t just limited to 140 characters.  On June 24, 20.7 million people looked to news sites on the day Slovakia knocked out Italy, according to Akami.  At the start of the finals, there were just over 12 million surfers.

The Netherlands was the most tweeted team and Cristiano Ronaldo was the most tweeted player, (Mashable 15/7).  The World Cup topped What’s the Trend’s Twitter Top 10 for the week ending 17/6.  The Vuvuzela stayed in the charts for six days.   When England’s tournament started with its match as the USA, a staggering 30 per cent of all status updates on Facebook were linked to the game.

So, that was some of the general numbers.  We tailored our research to the conversation around the World Cup and social media and had a quick look at the lead topics for both Twitter, and the wider conversation on social media and the finals.

Figure 1: Buzz volumes for Twitter in the social media discussion for the World Cup -11/6 to 11/7

Figure 2:  Twitter Topic cloud for the World Cup conversation around social media – 11/6 to 11/7

We noticed a couple of stand-out topics from the usual suspects in terms of the media.  The Guardian had the most prominent mention among media sources.  One tweet linked to the paper’s stunning Twitter replay graphic of real-time tweets sent as matches played out.  Mashable’s official World Cup tracking page was also one of the most tweeted topics.

It wasn’t just the fans that had a social media tournament.  The official sponsors moved from traditional advertising channels to social media.  The big winner was Coca Cola, which even advertised as a trending topic on Twitter.  It registered 86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6 per cent in the 24 hours following its first promoted trend ad (Mashable 27/6). The company added 1.4 million fans during the tournament.

All in all, this time, it was right to believe the hype, there really was a social media pitch invasion at the World Cup.