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?
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