I'll put my hands up and admit that I'm really not that interested in football at all...like, not even a little bit. That being said, working at Glasgow 2014 has piqued my interest in how the biggest football event of the year uses social media, with a particular focus on Twitter, to engage and communicate with their fans.
Last night, the first match of the tournament #BRAvCRO, or Brazil vs Croatia to you and I generated over 12.2million tweets during the match. With 3,336 tweets per minute using the hashtag synonymous with the competition, #WorldCup. The tweets came from all over the world with more than 150 countries joining in the conversation. Check out this cool heat-map which visualises the conversation, and shows the huge influx in activity when a goal was scored.
As we know, people love to share photos via social media - and that was no different last night. Twitter have pulled together an interactive gallery of some of the most shared photos posted during the match, with the top two coming from the Official @FIFAWorldCup account. The most mentioned player of the match was Brazil's top goal scorer @NeymarJ who consequently gained over 165,000 new followers on the day of the match. (10x the amount of followers he gains a day on average)
Look what happened to @neymarjr’s followers after his #BrazilvsCroatia performance https://t.co/YybPLg6pzg pic.twitter.com/891lw3SfYT
— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) June 13, 2014
Taking a look at the official @FIFAWorldCup twitter account we can see that they have 1.47 million followers. Interestingly, the account has been branded as the 'FIFA World Cup' organisation, rather than the individual event IE twitter.com/Brazil2014. This means that in four year's time when the next world cup rolls around they can just 're-brand' the channel and will have a solid follower-base of 2 million +....give or take a few hundred thousand.
Another thing I find really interesting, and quite surprising is that the channel doesn't seem to offer any customer service facility - from looking at its 'tweets and replies' feed there aren't any direct @mentions to fans which would indicate them answering questions. With so many people using social media to voice their opinions/make enquiries I wonder if they are missing a trick here. On the other hand they may have made a conscious decision to make the channel purely about pushing out the best/most relevant content - and leave the questions about parking spaces to some poor guy on the end of a phone.
In terms of content so far they seem to be covering a nice range of different types of material. They are giving fans exclusive insights by showing behind-the-scenes content like the players' dressing room and a shot of the stadium before the Opening Ceremony started. They are also sharing the most up-to-date information like team line ups, and live tweeting throughout matches. Not forgetting to engage with the fans, they're also asking a lot of engaging questions - and RT'ing some of the best answers, which always helps in driving up the replies. The web page they seem to be driving the most traffic to is the match specific Live Blog which is pretty nifty showing a range of content like quotes, facts, stats, weather and photos of people wearing carrots on their head. El dente! I mean....GOOOAAALLLLL!
I'll be looking out for interesting content throughout the rest of the tournament and will be saving my cheers for my sweepstake selection. Go Cameroon!
Thanks for reading, Melissa.
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