The 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia has provided constant talking points on Twitter over the last few weeks, and the social media site has carried out some number crunching to let us know which players, teams and incidents got us tweeting the most.
Twitter users, whether they were interested in football or not, are sure to have seen countless match updates, hashflags, VAR debates and gifs of footballers with a dubious resistance to gravity as the event unfolded between June 14th and its climax last weekend.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Sunday’s final between France and Croatia was the match that generated the most activity. France’s thrilling 4-3 win against Argentina was also in the top five most tweeted matches, but the other three involved football and social media mad Brazil. The Seleção’s games against Belgium, Mexico and Costa Rica all made the list, perhaps helped by the flamboyant and often attention-seeking antics of their poster boy Neymar.
https://twitter.com/AlexBenito1991/status/1015325513303412736
VIDEO: The kids are training and watch what happens immediately the Coach shouts #NEYMAR.#Socialight pic.twitter.com/pzlXdPQvYv
— Socialight Group (@socialightng) July 9, 2018
The Paris Saint-Germain forward was the most tweeted about player of the World Cup, and his countrymen took to Twitter more than any other nation during the tournament. Japan saw the second most social media activity, perhaps spurred on by a better than expected showing from its team, and the same could be said about the UK in third. Rubbishing the stereotype of Americans not caring about football, the US came fourth even though its team didn’t qualify.
What was your moment of the World Cup? For Twitter, it was France’s fourth goal by emerging star Kylian Mbappé in the final, which saw more tweets per minute than any other World Cup incident. In second place was Philippe Coutinho’s late goal for Brazil against Costa Rica, which was hardly a standout moment for most of us, but perhaps shows the extent to which Brazilian football sends Twitter into overdrive. The tournament’s biggest shock, Germany finishing bottom of their group after a humbling defeat to South Korea, came third.
Of course, the World Cup was not just about football, but is also one of the world’s biggest opportunities for branding. Twitter has revealed that Budweiser was the most mentioned brand of the tournament, with Adidas, Coca-Cola, Nike and Apple making up the top five. Indeed, with 115 Twitter impressions during the course of the World Cup, such events offer great social media marketing potential for companies large and small, which should do what they can to get in on trending topics.
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