Cristiano Ronaldo and Brazil top Twitter trends as World Cup dominates tweets

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This article was published 10/07/2010 (5933 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO – As widely predicted, the World Cup has been a very big deal for Twitter over the last few weeks, setting records for traffic and exposing North Americans to an oft-ignored reality: the U.S.-based social networking site is actually bigger in the rest of the world than it is here.

Twitter last publicly stated that 60 per cent of its more than 190 million users live outside the U.S., so while many were tweeting about soccer, even more were talking football, futbol, futebol, voetbal, fussball or calcio in their own languages.

And according to the website What The Trend, World Cup-related tweets have consistently dominated the conversation on Twitter, with all the other topics representing just a fraction of the chatter. Of the Top 10 hottest topics on Twitter in the last month, only one, the movie “The Last Airbender,” was not related to the World Cup.

“It really shows how international Twitter is … I think U.S. users are surprised to see all these players from Portugal and Uruguay and the Netherlands (trending) that they’ve never heard of, but it’s really a global social network now,” said spokeswoman Liz Pullen.

She noted that the names of all 32 nations that qualified for the tournament were trending during the first week, as did the names of 99 out of the 736 players who competed in South Africa.

“I just thought that was really remarkable considering there’s not a lot of Twitter users in Greece, or probably not a lot Nigeria, for example,” Pullen said.

Portugal has been the most tweeted about team, largely based on talk about underachieving star Cristiano Ronaldo.

“The big story coming out of the World Cup was Cristiano Ronaldo, who didn’t play extremely well but he dominated all players (in tweets) tenfold,” she said.

“He’s entered into David Beckham territory as the celebrity of the games.”

Brazil and its players also ranked high on the list of most tweeted topics, reflecting that the nation of about 200 million people is thought to be the second biggest market of Twitter users, behind the United States.

“The most vocal fans have been in South America, especially Brazil, they have really ruled the football trending topics during the whole World Cup,” Pullen said.

Surprisingly, although the U.K. is estimated to have the third-largest base of users, England’s team and its players didn’t trend very high — until they lost.

“Only then they were very vocal in their unhappiness,” she said. “Sometimes the only thing you hear are when people are unhappy with something or are complaining and some fans didn’t really use Twitter when they were indifferent. But once they were really upset they wanted a place to vent.”

Much of the World Cup tweets were also less about discussing the games and more about taunting opposing fans, she added.

“It’s been really interesting to see people use Twitter in an international forum to try to humiliate other teams that they’ve had long-standing rivalries with. People take their issues out online — but it’s better than having fights at soccer matches.”

Twitter usually processes an average of 65 million tweets daily and the company fully expected those numbers to be trounced during the global tournament’s run. But it failed to manage the strong surges of traffic and had frequent outages.

“From a site stability and service outage perspective, it’s been Twitter’s worst month since last October,” the company admitted in a blog post just a few days into the tournament.

“Record traffic and unprecedented spikes in activity are never simple to manage. However, we were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn’t anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event.”

In the first few days of the tournament, records were set for tweets per second after goals were scored. First, Twitter noted games between Japan and Cameroon, Brazil and North Korea, and Mexico and South Africa sparked as many as 2,940 tweets per second. While those record numbers were narrowly bested a few days later after the L.A. Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics in the NBA finals, the World Cup set another new mark after Japan beat Denmark 3-1.

While it doesn’t appear that anything during the World Cup has topped one of Twitter’s biggest events, the death of Michael Jackson, the sustained attention on soccer has been unrivalled, said Ignacio Perez, an engineer with the tracking website Trendistic. Day after day, Twitter was hit with big traffic spikes during or after a game.

“If you look at July 3, when Argentina played Germany, coach Diego Maradona had almost four per cent of all the tweets sent at one point. A coach getting almost four per cent is very big,” he said.

Perez estimates that at that same time, tweets including Argentina represented 6.65 per cent of all tweets, Germany was typed into 2.28 per cent of all tweets and the phrase “World Cup” was in 1.75 per cent of all tweets.

But even adding up those totals — which isn’t an accurate estimate since some tweets likely combined several of those keywords — doesn’t compare to the one-off Twitter phenomenon that was Jackson’s death.

“To give you a benchmark, when Michael Jackson died his death was the biggest thing in Trendistic history, it accounted for 22.6 per cent of tweets, which is amazing,” Perez said.