World Cup 2014 Breaks Twitter Records

More than 672 million tweets were sent during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, peaking with 35.6 million messages posted on the social networking during Germany’s 7-1 victory over Brazil in the semi-final on 13 July – a record.

The second most active match was the final itself with 32.1 million tweets sent during the clash between Argentina and eventual winners Germany last Sunday, with the other semi-final between the Netherlands and Argentina the third most popular match with 14.2 million tweets and Brazil’s second round and quarter final matches making up the top five.

Twitter World Cup

The single most active moment of the entire competition was when Germany’s victory was confirmed, with tweets being spewed at a rate of 618,725 a minute, with the other four such events occurring either during the final or the Germans’ semi-final.

Brazil’s Neymar was the most mentioned player during the tournament, followed by Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Uruguay’s Luis Suarez, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Holland’s Arjen Robben.

Twitter also analysed where messages were coming from and which countries were being talked about the most, with users encouraged to use hashtags for each country, such as #ENG and #BRA, which would also produce a ‘hashflag’ for each country.

“The World Cup lived up to its name,” says the company, which has produced a series of maps for each day of the competition, showing which parts of the world were the most active on Twitter.

Incidentally, there were 7.2 million tweets sent during the day of England’s first match against Italy and 6.2 million on 19 June, when England lost 2-1 to Uruguay. EE reported that both matches caused a surge in traffic on its network, with social media use and streaming through BBC iPlayer and ITV Player increasing dramatically, although the single biggest spike in the operator’s history was caused by Tim Cahill’s spectacular goal against Holland for Australia at 17:21 on 18 June.

Excited for the World Cup? Find out with our sporting IT quiz!