World Cup surpasses London 2012 on social with more than 300m tweets sent in last fortnight
More than 300 million tweets about the World Cup have been sent in the last two weeks, dwarfing the 150 million tweets sent during the 16 days of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
The record number of tweets sent makes the World Cup one of the most talked about events of all time on the social networking site, with the opening match between Brazil and Croatia two weeks ago driving the most Twitter conversation so far with 12.2 million tweets sent.
Ahead of the knockout stage, which begins tomorrow (Saturday 28 June), the most tweeted about moment of the tournament’s group stage was Brazil’s Marcelo’s own goal in the opening match.
Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Brazil’s Neymar Jr. are the competition’s most talked about players, with Suárez in third place, Christian Ronaldo in fourth and England’s Wayne Rooney in fifth.
Italy’s Mario Balotelli has provided the World Cup’s most retweeted tweet so far, with his comment on England’s chances after their defeat by Uruguay last Thursday (19 June) retweeted more than 177,000 times to be seen more than 17 million times on Twitter.
England’s performance on Twitter is markedly better than in the tournament placing eighth out of the 32 teams involved in terms of mentions. The England vs Italy match notched up 7.2 million tweets and England vs Uruguay generated 6.7 million tweets making them the seventh and eighth most tweeted about matches globally so far.
England’s final match against Costa Rica was much more subdued affair ranking the 36th (out of 48) most-tweeted about match with only 1.5 million tweets. The top five mentioned England players were Rooney, Gerrard, Sturridge, Wilshere, Cahill and Lampard.
Based on Twitter mentions, the top five teams in the tournament are Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Croatia and the USA, though only Brazil and the USA have made it through to the next stage.