Social Media and the FIFA World Cup 2010: A Success Story

The 2010 FIFA World Cup began in South Africa on June 11th and for one month soccer fans all over the world will be glued to their TVs and computers to watch it. While the World Cup has always been one of the world’s most viewed sporting events, this year will be the first in which social media plays a major role.

According to Beet.tv , Akamai , the world’s largest operator of a network of computers, published on its website information showing that, "[The 11th (the first day of the World Cup 2010)] was the busiest day for bandwidth demand for news sites,” since the inception of the Net Usage Index for News (August 18, 2005).  According to their information there were, “11 million visitor requests per minute to its network, up 233 percent from the normal demand at [that] time,” and, “the previous record for bandwidth requests for news sites was the Election Day victory (11/5/08) of President Barack Obama where demand peaked at 8 million visitor requests per minute.”

The 2010 World Cup is the first cup since the enormous popularity growth of social media. The last FIFA World Cup, which took place in 2006, was too early to make use of some of the more popular social media tools like Twitter and Facebook (both which launched in 2006). Many social media experts predicted that this year’s cup would be the biggest sporting event ever to hit social media platforms due to its international appeal and social media's ability to share not only the events themselves, but also fans’ individual opinions and experiences which can be communicated in real-time. Now that the first week of the competition is finished, we can  see that those predictions are accurate. With the official FIFA Facebook Fanpage at well over 45,000 fans and @FIFAcom FIFA's Twitter account at almost 70,000 followers, it doesn't look like the tide of fans/followers flocking to these accounts for their event information fix will be slowing down anytime soon.

We will have to wait until the cup is over to get official stats on the role and impact of social media during the event, but it is pretty safe to say that it is an enormously popular trending topic in social media, and that as the matches come to a head, the World Cup's presence on social media platforms will only increase.

How Can You Watch the World Cup Using the Web and Social Media?

• Facebook – official group for worldwide fans of the World Cup 2010
• Twitter – official news from FIFA @FIFAcom and  each country’s team Twitter Feed
• Tweetbeat
• Worldcup Blog – the official World Cup 2010 Blog
• Live Streaming Video – ESPN3.com  (live streaming all but 10 of the 64 matches with ESPNradio and ESPN Mobile streaming the rest) and UnivisionFutbol.com (streaming every match)
• View game highlights and recaps on: Footytube, FIFA on YouTube, Fifa.com
• Mobile – ESPN 2010 World Cup App

Posted by Amberlie Denny at June 23, 2010 8:15 AM

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