Rio de Janeiro - The World Cup is breaking all records for social media use, football's world governing body Fifa said on Wednesday after Germany's 7-1 semi-final win against Brazil became a massive Twitter and Facebook hit.
“There were huge figures last night for Twitter and Facebook,” Fifa's head of digital Matt Stone said. “For Facebook they had already more people talking about the World Cup than the Superbowl, the Oscars and Sochi (winter Olympics) combined. That shows how big the World Cup is on social platforms.”
The semi-final on Tuesday in Belo Horizonte was the most discussed sports event on Twitter, generating a record 35.6 million tweets.
The social media website said the match broke the previous record of 24.9 million tweets registered earlier this year by the NFL Super Bowl.
After Germany's Sami Khedira scored the fifth goal against the hosts tweets peaked to an all-time record of 580 166 per minute, beating the 360 000 tweets per minute registered for Miley Cyrus's performance last year at the MTV music awards.
The player who got the most mention in the tweets was Miroslav Klose, who broke the all-time World Cup scoring record with his 16th goal.
Social networking website Facebook recorded 200 million interactions between 66 million users related to the semi-final match. Stone said the World Cup so far had attracted some 305 million people to Fifa's “global stadium” in which fans can interact during matches via its social media and online platforms, the “big story is social and mobile,” Stone said.
Around 107 million people have connected to official content on mobile devices and there have been 23 million app downloads since June 1. “This is by far the biggest sport event app ever,” he said.
Fifa began its website in 1995 and relaunched it in 2011. It opened its first Twitter account ahead of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and launched its official app in November 2013.
An Instagram account was opened several months ago. Fifa now claims to have 447 million Facebook users. - Sapa-dpa