Let’s take a look back at some of the bigger stories of the World Cup from social media, as well as the prominence of the event in Europe.

One widely reported research result from the knockout stages of the World Cup was how Twitter users reacted to the penalty shootouts. Twitter’s own research department put out a graph of the Greece v Costa Rica match, which was widely picked up in the press.

In particular, Twitter noted that sometimes “silence tells the story”:

Parallels can be drawn here to other events. Particularly, we looked in the past at how different forms of television spark Twitter conversation, with reality television frequently seeing peaks in discussion during the show.

This contrasts with dramas such as Sherlock, which often see their peaks at the end, with a similar “anticipation” window during the show itself.

The US (and Australia) loves football

As we discussed previously, the World Cup has set viewing and streaming records in the United States.

It seems the presence of Americans in the Twitter conversation hasn’t been significantly hit by their team’s elimination. Germany v Brazil had the highest viewing figures of any World Cup semi-final in American television history, and was the highest ranked non-US game ever on ESPN/ESPN2.

A look at tweets on generic World Cup hashtags from July 10-14 show the US led the way in number of tweets. Brazil ranked second, with locals still interested through their team’s third-place playoff (and, of course, any tourists who had changed their timezone). London ranked third with finalists Argentina in fourth place:

In Australia, SBS also reported new streaming records for its World Cup coverage across mobile and online, with users showing a large preference for “live” coverage versus on-demand. SBS’ World Cup multi-stream service (below) won many plaudits, with the only negative being that sound issues persisted throughout the final.

Comic relief

As ever, beyond the discussion of the matches themselves, social media remains a hotbed for sarcasm and humour. FIFA president Sepp Blatter was a source of controversy throughout the tournament, and – sitting next to Vladamir Putin – remained a source of amusement (and marketing) in the final, as shown in this tweet by Betfair Australia:

Also prominent during the penalty shootout that decided the Netherlands v Argentina semi-final was a mistake from British commentator Peter Drury, who was featured on the television feed that went to range of countries including Australia.

Drury has never been one of the most popular commentators, and his mistake – being ready to proclaim the Netherlands victors in the semi-final – quickly spread around the internet. See the Drury penalty call below:

The view from Europe

We started this series of articles discussing the role of brands during the World Cup, and that was one of the themes in Europe as well. In many cities you were unable to move without noticing some form of localised World Cup branding, including the following example from Cyprus (which did not qualify).

Noticeable across Europe, though, were extensive World Cup decorations: from bars in basically every city, through to the large screens that inundated public squares, and – in the case of Amsterdam – a sea of orange which descended upon the city and sat above nearly every pathway in the Centrum.

And that’s the World Cup.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

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Particularly interesting in the discussion of streaming figures is that such activity is able to be measured in “streaming minutes” or “data transferred” – much more specific metrics than traditional audience figures.

Accurate global TV ratings are still a way off, considering the official FIFA World Cup 2010 Audience Report came out almost a year after the tournament.

Twitter and ratings are undeniably connected, but the extent of the correlation often depends of the type of broadcast: whether it’s a live sporting event, soap opera finale or reality television show.

Indeed, a breakdown of the global tweets by timezone shows the dominance of US viewers in the Twitter conversation (including non-English hashtags):

Previous work by Nielsen has shown Sports, Reality TV and Comedy are genres where tweets have a causal relationship with viewer numbers, with Nielsen reporting that in 28% of sports programming measured, tweets had an impact on viewing numbers.

As we contended in last week’s article, it’s possible viewers tweet when bored, as well as when excited, during a game. But it is also possible that those not watching the game are also tweeting about it, so any correlation between ratings and tweets, for sporting events, needs a bit more research.

Match tweets

The US/World Cup love story continues in the graph below with the US vs Portugal match dominating match conversation for the week, and taking the lead in our “tweets by match” table.

ESPN also found that the:

USA vs Portugal contest on Sunday, June 22 is the most-viewed soccer match across all US television networks, averaging 18,220,000 viewers.

The top match in this graph has roughly a third more tweets than any match in the tournament so far, with top matches in previous weeks peaking at around 263,000.

It’s also possible from what we have discussed above that the Brazil vs Mexico match was bumped up by the large Mexican contingency located in the US timezones, as well as the enormous Brazil following on Twitter that we’ve seen in previous weeks.

The most talked-about event by far at the World Cup last week was the Luis Suarez bite.

The bite followed two other incidents of Suarez biting in the past, creating a storm of online conversation that can be seen in the visualisation of the most common words in tweets mentioning Suarez (note also the prominence of “Snickers”, a recurring example of brand impact on the World Cup):

The controversy around the bite mostly relates to whether Suarez intentionally bit the other player or just fell in an unfortunate position making it look like he bit him – as some Uruguayans have argued. Again, asking the question of whether video-technology should be more widely used in the game as recently discussed by Miguel Sicart.

Diego Maradona, the Argentinian whose hand-ball goal in the 1986 World Cup sparked much controversy said:

This is football, this is incidental contact […] They have no commonsense or a fan’s sensibility. Luisito, we are with you.

And a Reuters report notes:

The referee did not spot the incident during the match, but FIFA’s rules allow the use of video or “any other evidence” to punish players retrospectively.

Indeed FIFA did punish Suarez, announcing a nine-match ban on June 26 (the second spike visible in the graph below):

While the correlation is clear between real-time events and Twitter, the graph above quantifies just how vocal Twitter users have been around the Suarez incident, with the bite generating more than 3,500 tweets per minute at peak.

The lower volume for the announcement of the ban is also a signifier of the number of people watching the game(s) live and tweeting, versus those who use Twitter as a more general information source or discussion platform about the World Cup.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

by Darryl Woodford & Katie Prowd

The 2014 World Cup has already seen a significant volume of Twitter conversation across a number of (English language) keywords, including #joinin, #worldcup, #Brazil2014 and #worldcup2014, as well as the Twitter-marketed international hashtags:

• #Brasil2014 (Spanish)
• #Brésil2014 (French)
• #wm2014 (German)
• #Copa2014 (Portugese)
• #mm2014 (Finnish).

And unsurprisingly, riding this wave of hashtags are the brands that look to profit from the tournament – whether they’re official sponsors or not.

With the launch of a new interface designed to promote World Cup discussion, Twitter is actively encouraging users to flag support for their national team and to participate in World Cup discussion through Twitter.

On the opening day of the games Twitter presented a new layout, as well as a step-by-step process encouraging people to tweet their support for their team and change their profile image:

After clicking “Let’s go!” on the page above, users are escorted through a number of personalised set up pages; from selecting their national team and changing their profile picture:

… through to following favourite players, and even preparing a tweet using the #WorldCup hashtag and the account of your national team:

While these are obvious promotional tools, they have likely contributed to the increase in followers for many players, as well as the Twitter activity around the tournament in general.

While the BBC’s Gary Lineker on Tuesday described Brazil 2014 on air as “the first social media world cup”, South Africa 2010 also saw plenty of social media activity. However the impact of social media on traditional media coverage is particularly prominent in the UK at the moment.

Twitter has also been documenting the tournament through its blog and tweets from the TwitterData account. For researchers, replicating such analysis is difficult as World Cup-related tweets frequently exceed the limit of 1% of tweets that be freely accessed through the Twitter API. Despite this, there are a few notable stories from week one.

Brands seek to capitalise on World Cup audience

While it’s clear that the World Cup is a brand marketing exercise, the lead up to the tournament demonstrated how the brand is being appropriated for marketing purposes on social media, far beyond the official sponsors.

And while using the World Cup brand in traditional media may see offending companies hit with a lawsuit, using the social media hashtag appears to be a risk worth taking.

FIFA have not taken trademark infringement lightly either, officially releasing a warning in March stating that

The contribution of FIFA’s commercial affiliates is vital to the success of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and we therefore ask companies to refrain from attempts to free-ride on the huge public interest generated by the event.

Yet according to Alex Benady from PR Week:

FIFA, players, the media, the FA and other national associations, and of course brands with no contractual relationship with the World Cup, will all be working their social media networks for all they are worth.

Supporting this, the 20th most popular retweet in the week leading up to the World Cup using English keywords was the following from (unaffiliated) British company Fragrance Direct:

Other brands, sponsors and otherwise are also heavily represented in the most frequent retweets:

The top 25 tweets above contain many brands (including FIFA sponsors such as Adidas, Budweiser and EA Sports, as well as non-sponsors such as Goldman Sachs and Fragrance Direct), able to associate with the World Cup brand on social media on an equal basis.

While the brands may see this as merely interacting with a current event, for those at FIFA and for paying sponsors, this may well appear as ambush marketing.

Such trends extended into the first week of the tournament, with the top retweets over the first week notably also dominated by big brands and television networks:

Top 10 matches

With the first round underway, we can also see which matches (and teams) are receiving the most attention on Twitter:

This tells an interesting visual story of not only the top matches but also how the worldwide audience is using Twitter during the World Cup.

While the top match to date is (perhaps predictably) the opener of the tournament – Brazil vs Croatia – the presence of England vs Italy as the second may speak both to the audience participating in the hashtag conversation and the international interest in the game itself.

As the tournament continues, it will be interesting to correlate tweet volume with television audiences worldwide, as those figures become available, and to consider whether the teams with the most historic World Cup success, or FIFA Ranking, are those receiving the most attention this time around, both on Twitter and on television.

Other stories from around the web

Elsewhere on the web, analysis of both social media and statistical data around the world cup is gathering steam. Kimono Labs have launched what they claim to be the first open World Cup API, while the Regressing Blog on Deadspin features a round-up of the top prediction models on the web.

Also of interest this week is the CartoDB visualisation of Twitter activity around the World Cup opening match, and Twitter’s own visualisation of the increase in Neymar’s followers, part of their extensive coverage of the opener which also includes the Predictaroo.

We’ll be back after Round 2 with some more from the ground in Europe and Brazil, as well as the latest data from our Twitter Machines, and a look at how TV stations are using Twitter in the early stages.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.