RWC2015 opening weekend social media round-up: Japan victory sparks top tournament buzz
Japan’s first Rugby World Cup victory in 24 years raised the bar for the tournament’s social media engagements during an action-packed opening weekend.
Data from social intelligence platform Brandwatch found that Japan was the most mentioned nation garnering over 156,000 interactions, trumping home nation England’s 110,000 mentions.
Pixlee research found that the shock defeat of South Africa by Japan also sparked three of the most retweeted and favourited RWC2015 photos on Twitter, from @rugbyworldcup, @TheLadBible and the @rugbyworldcup again respectively.
During the opening weekend, there were 58,754 photo submissions from 37,341 unique submitters across Instagram and Twitter, reaching a total of 339.15m people. By post volume, Cardiff was the most engaged area on social media followed by Brighton and Wembley.
Furthermore, the list of the top influencers around RWC2015 was topped by David Cameron (@number10gov), followed by @SkyNews and @MeridianoTV.
Brandwatch measured the online sentiment towards tournament sponsors with Canterbury, Mastercard and Emirates enduring the most negativity.
A breakdown of the weekend’s top rugby hashtags on Twitter saw Japan and South Africa fixture generate the most online buzz.
Over a third of the tournament’s tweets came from woman, boasting over 86,378 authors.
This comes after analysis from Amobee research stated that official sponsor Heineken dominated digital engagement on the opening weekend of the tournament.