Who Is The Typical World Cup Fan In The States? And, Other Social Media Chatter...

You may as well ask. A global event always translates into action time for social media to demonstrate its effectiveness to advertisers. The World Cup is no different. Except, this time we have three different firms claiming three sets of results, so far.

First, the local perspective.

According to an analysis of 1.6 billion tweets by Networked Insights, a social media analytics firm, the typical American World Cup fan is a beer-guzzling, video game- and documentary-loving Washington D.C. resident, who starts his/her day by checking ESPN and StupidDope. In statistical terms, the fan talks about documentaries three times as much as the average person; video games, twice as much; and beer, 1.8 times as much. "Washington’s international flavor makes it an obvious U.S. city to embrace the world's game," says Rick Miller, Vice President of Strategic Insights at Networked Insights.

According to their research, soccer is mostly an East Coast phenomenon with cities from that coast making up five of the top 10 cities most interested in the event. The Seattle-Tacoma region, which ranked second, is the lone West Coaster in the list. The Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport region in Virginia is ranked third and Las Vegas and Salt Lake City round out the top five cities. Toledo in Ohio is least interested in the World Cup with New Orleans coming in a close second.

An Uber Soccer Event

UberVu, a real-time social media marketing platform from Hootsuite, mines social media data about the World Cup for an assortment of mentions including player, team, and country names and hashtags for the event or country. Thus, businesses can track social media mentions for individual players and, also, track social media activity for the World Cup at a high level (such as tracking mentions for the #worldcup hashtag). I checked out World Cup data for the week from 12 June to 18 June.

The superstars of the World Cup, or players who are fashion and sport icons, are superstars on social media as well. With over 72,000 mentions, Brazil’s Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, underwear model and player extraordinaire, is the most mentioned player on social media. Argentina’s Lionel Messi ranks second and Ronaldo, a perennial favorite in recent times, is third. The order is not surprising but the number of mentions for the last week seems pretty low in comparison to major trending topics.

Brazil is the host country, a leading contender and home to two of the most-mentioned players  on social media. Naturally, it is also the most-mentioned on social media with 774,000 mentions in a variety of contexts. The second-most mentioned country on social media for the week I checked was USA.  This is not surprising when you consider that America has the largest base of social media users. In addition, soccer has seen rapid growth in popularity here. Social media companies, such as Twitter, have been quick to capitalize on the soccer mania and have launched custom initiatives for the event.

With over 27 percent mentions of the total number on social media, the United States is the most prolific country tweeting, Facebooking, and Instagramming about the World Cup. Surprisingly, Brazil accounts for only four percent of total mentions about the World Cup, according to UberVu. This may be due to the fact that Twitter, possibly the strongest barometer of world events, is not popular in Brazil. Based on latest data, Facebook is the most popular social network in Brazil. India and Indonesia - two countries which are not playing the World Cup - are also enthralled with the World Cup on social media. Again, this is probably a commentary on social media penetration in their respective countries, rather than an actual barometer of the sport's popularity.

Another Day, Another Study, And Another Perspective

According to a study by Adobe Systems, however, the Asia-Pacific region is most active in social media chatter about the World Cup. It accounts for over 48 percent of World Cup mentions and is followed by EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) at 32 percent and the Americas at 20 percent.

Their study also has some interesting results about the number of times that a country playing in the World Cup is mentioned on social media. Japan, which has played only a single game so far, topped the list of countries with most mentions with 37 percent of the total number. The United Kingdom, Germany and United States lagged far behind at 11 percent and 8 percent respectively. In an interesting reversal of positions from UberVu’s results, Ronaldo takes home the top honors for most-mentioned player followed by Neymar.

The disparity in results could be due to a number of factors. For example, the Adobe study does not mention the timeframe for which they measured social media activity. Similarly, Google's Orkut, which is fairly popular in Brazil, is not tracked by UberVu (which, perhaps, accounts for the low number of social media mentions about the event. Finally, there is the ever-present problem of bots, which can skew results dramatically.

Still, the broad agreement between the studies highlights the growing importance of social media. While you digest this post, it is time for me to catch another match...