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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.
It was early doors, but all the signs were there: World Cup fans have already gone Twitter mad.
The micro-blog buckled under the weight of tweets in the build-up to the first match on 11 June. The site had already experienced a few outages and had to post an explanation on the technical difficulties which led to its poor performance. (Twitter.com 11/6)
The Twitter team went on to warn: “As more people turn to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world (or in the World Cup), you may still see the whale when there are unprecedented spikes in traffic“. (Twitter.com 11/6)
During the opening game between hosts South Africa and Mexico, CNN.com’s Twitter buzz counted around 300,000 tweets. (NewTeeVee 11/6)
We’re monitoring the impact of social media on the World Cup, so had a quick look at the buzz driving the surge on Twitter on 11 June. By drilling down by channel, we were able to generate the top 75 lead topics on the micro-blog. This enabled us to analyse the noise-to-signal ratio of tweets and filter conversations which kicked off debates which would linger longer than many hangovers.
Figure 1: Twitter topic cloud – 11/6
For example, a quick click on mentions of The Guardian in the topic cloud led us to a discussion about football fans and brewers joining forces to fight a hike in beer tax during the tournament.
In terms of sentiment on Twitter (11/6):
There were 2015 positive mentions, 3561 neutral mentions and 331 negative mentions.
Most of the positive chatter was driven by sheer exuberance that the World Cup was starting.
The arrest of the head of Rwanda’s Football Federation, Brig-Gen Jean Bosco Kazura, for attempting to leave the country without permission was one of the key negative mentions. The soldier was heading to the World Cup.
So, what’s on the horizon?
In the weeks leading up to the first match, the Vuvuzela topped Mashable’s Twitter Trends chart (12/6). The plastic stadium horn sounds like a drone of bees – music to some ears – worse than tinnitus to others – musical Marmite.
As the teams got down to business, France captain Patrice Evra complained that he couldn’t sleep because of the Vuvuzela racket. The Serb team complained that the din impacted their concentration and they gave away a ’stupid’ penalty during the Ghana game, (Yahoo.com 13/6). FIFA had already considered banning the horns. It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
If first-day traffic numbers for Twitter are an indication of what’s to come, then it seems there will at least be a micro-blog pitch invasion at this year’s World Cup.
p.s. There was another link last week to an old report on BBC News’ popular stories. This time it was a report on a sponsorship settlement between FIFA and Mastercard – from 2007! (BBC News 21/6/07)
Wonder if this issue will be resuscitated by social media, just like the Mars story? (See post on 10 June – Why was Mars back in the conversation?)
