World Cup 2014 — Followers Before and After
“There have been more tweets about the 2014 World Cup, before a ball has been kicked, than for the entire tournament in 2010.”
The World Cup was the most social sporting event since the dawn of social media. It trumped the Super Bowl and the Olympics in terms of engagement, tweets, Facebook likes — the whole nine yards. 16 million tweets were exchanged during the Brazil-Chile game alone (389,000 per minute). Tim Howard became an overnight superstar/sensation via social media: #ThingsTimHowardCouldSave. Even the soccer stars themselves turned to social media to explain, confess, and counter negative press (ex: Luis Suárez).
Now that the World Cup has ended, we collected the number of followers from each of the 32 participating teams from before the event and compared it to the number of followers from each of the teams after the event. The follower count for each of the teams increased significantly throughout the tournament.
Take a look at this graph and infographic:
