July 15, 2014: This year’s World Cup which has seen a lot of ups and downs and had its share of controversies will go down in the history not only because it was won by Germany but also that it has been put on record as the biggest social media event on record involving 350 million Facebook users. This claim which was made by the company on Monday proves that it has made inroads into the ‘real time’ market dominated by Twitter.
Speaking about this, Nick Grudin, Facebook’s Director of Global Media Partnerships was quoted as talking to Reuters “We knew the World Cup was going to be big, but this level of engagement is remarkable.” He further added “It was the highest level of conversation around a single event that we have ever measured.”
Some of the other highlights of this report are:
- The World Cup final on Sunday which saw Germany’s win over Argentina by 1-0 was the most commented match of the tournament, with 88 million users and 280 million interactions.
- Brazil’s star Neymar led the ranking of most talked about player, followed by Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Uruguay’s Luis Suárez.
- Brazil was the strongest voice in Facebook’s biggest conversation ever with 26 percent of all World Cup interactions.
- The United States accounted for 10 percent of the posts, comments and likes
- Indonesia 6 percent Mexico 5 percent and Argentina 4 percent accounted for the other posts, comments and likes.
The numbers available with Reuters show that 3 billion posts, comments and likes were generated on Facebook by 350 million users which is a record. This audience number is crucial for companies like Facebook because of the money that it makes through ads which it sells it to the advertisers and the month long soccer tournament made billions of people glued on to the television sets.
