Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Facebook VS Twitter: Who Won the World Cup?

Maybe the final game between Argentina and Germany ended up with the win of the latter, but it has not been decided yet who won the social network battle. The two dominating social networks of our era, Facebook and Twitter, set as a goal before World Cup began to become the hub for real-time conversation about the world's biggest live sporting event.
Both networks showed impressive sound bytes throughout the games. On Monday, Facebook announced that there were 3 billion interactions (including likes, comments and posts) from 350 million users throughout the entire World Cup! In the meantime, Twitter released that users shared 672 million tweets related to the sporting event, although this us not apples to apples comparison.
If we consider this holistically, it seems like Facebook to be the actual winner. If we think that there were more people talking about the World Cup on Facebook than Twitter’s monthly active users, the win becomes even clearer. Though the comparison is somewhat unfair given Facebook’s scale (its user base is about five times the size of Twitter). Truth is, that the two networks may have been competing on the same game, but for different things. That is the case, given that different users are using the two social networks and for different reasons. A simple example would be: Twitter user: “ OMG happening now 7-1” versus Facebook user: “That was historical”, referring to Germany vs Brazil game.

Some analysts and marketers mention that Facebook may have enjoyed some remarkable engagement during the games, but the World Cup didn't do all that much to assert it as a true real-time platform. “The organic in-the-moment conversation around the World Cup really lives on Twitter," Sean Ryan, social and mobile director for JC Penney, told Mashable in an earlier interview, "We built our World Cup promotion strategy there."

Personally my Twitter home and my Facebook newsfeed were 90% World Cup the last month- I am sure you had the same experience. I was somewhat overloaded, so I have to admit that I’m kind of relieved now!
Read the entire article on Mashable here.

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