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World Cup final smashes social media records

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By CAITLIN MURRAY

When the final whistle blew on Sunday and Germany won the World Cup, Lukas Podolski celebrated the way many people would — by taking a selfie on his cell phone and tweeting it to his Twitter followers. It was retweeted by more than 90,000 people.

It’s perhaps a sign of the times when everything is an event to be played out on social media, but the World Cup final tops all others.

Germany’s 1-0 win over Argentina was the largest single event to date on Facebook, according to the world’s most popular social network. Facebook reported that 88 million people had interacted with the site regarding the final more than 280 million times via posts, likes and comments.

The match broke Facebook’s previous record, last year’s Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos, when Facebook recorded 245 million interactions.

Of the World Cup final’s Facebook interactions, 10.5 million were in the U.S., 10 million in Brazil, more than 7 million in Argentina and about 5 million in Germany.

The match also set a new Twitter record for a sporting event, with an average of 618,725 tweets per minute during the match. That eclipsed the previous 2010 World Cup when Spain beat the Netherlands — Twitter recorded only about 2,000 tweets per minute then.

Twitter’s raw total of tweets was 32.1 million during the match, with Twitter reporting the biggest spikes in discussion occurring when the final whistle blew to signal Germany had won, when Mario Gotze scored and when Lionel Messi received the Golden Ball award.

Across the tournament, Facebook reported 350 million users had joined the conversation on Facebook with 3 billion posts, comments and likes. Brazil led the way as the most-discussed team, accounting for 26 percent of World Cup interactions on the site. The U.S. came in second, with 10 percent. Facebook has 1.2 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of last year.

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What do you think of these numbers? Think it can mean anything for soccer in the States? Did you notice more of your friends discussing the World Cup?

Share your thoughts below.

Comments

  1. Good stats

    I am trying to build a case that WHEN THE SOCCER QUALITY IS GOOD Americans will watch and that our sport is closing in on being as popular as the NHL and yes the NBA

    NHL-5 times the amount of kids playing soccer than are hockey, MLS has better attendance than NHL, the EPL and Champions League has better TV ratings than NHL regular season and the AVERAGE of all World Cup games TV rating is higher than the average of Stanley Cup playoffs. TV ratings for the big games (US games semi finals and finals) crush Stanley Cup finals

    MLS also has slightly better attendance than the NBA and the EPL and Champions League crushes regular season NBA TV ratings. Overall the World Cup also has better TV ratings than NBA playoffs.

    The media can no longer say Americans will only watch when Americans play. If that were the case then the World Cup of Softball would have kicked ass this weekend. Probably no one reading this post even knew it was played this week.

    The only area that these two sports have over us is mainstream media coverage because the average talking head still feels inferior talking about soccer.

    When the games and players are good, Americans will watch. Now it is up to us to develop better players for them to watch

    Reply
    • Klose, I agree with many of the things your said but a good measuring stick to use which wasn’t said is TV contracts for domestic leagues. MLS has a great new TV contract but it’s still not as big as the NBA or NHL, not to mention that some NBA ticket prices are ridiculously high.
      Also, the NBA and NHL have the luxury of being the best league in the world for their respective sport therefore they have a lot more leverage in using a salary cap because they know the players won’t be going anywhere. In MLS, the salary cap will always put them behind the non-salary capped European leagues because the best players will always gravitate towards to largest contracts. The best thing that could happen to MLS, is for all of the owners in the European leagues come up with a capped system.
      Also, finally, MLS (or the USMNT) doesn’t have to kill off the NBA or NHL in order to get bigger (or huge). There’s plenty of room at the table for several mainstream sports, not just 4. If MLS can thrive in a salary-capped global system and sell their TV rights nationally at a high level (and even internationally eventually) then it will be in great shape for the long term future, but MLS will always be a feeder league if it has a salary cap while the EPL, La Liga, Serie A, and Bundes do not.

      Reply
    • yes, the 45-65 year old talking head on news and sports channels still know very little about soccer, and even have a snarkiness to their comments at times. Like the two guys on ESPN’s pardon the interruption, they always talk about the popularity or lack-there-of in stead of the game(s), and you always hear people bringing up the same old clichés like Americans want more scoring, or America has such a large population so why isn’t winning the World Cup easy?, or the rest of the non-sense they regurgitate every four years, but they are invisible the remainder of the 3.75 years where the World Cup is “dorment” in their eyes. You’ll know soccer finally finally makes it into the mainstream when they stop talking about it getting into the mainstream. Do you think England has news stories about the popularity of the EPL? no. So once these lame stories go away, it will be a good day.

      Reply
  2. does anyone know the numbers on passenger pigeons? thats my preferred means of communication with the outside world

    Reply

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