Hashflags and kissing the Queen: how the #WorldCup’s played out on Twitter

Let’s face it: given the tendency to flock to Twitter to discuss real time events, the fact that so many major players have their own account and the social network’s custom team-tracking features, the World Cup was always going to be a big thing on Twitter. But just how big?

The team over at Twitter has shared some insight on the group stage of the Fifa World Cup — and there has been a lot of cause for chatter. Major teams like England, Spain, Portugal and Italy saw their dreams of glory crumble, and a Uruguayan player you may have heard of had a chomp of Italian on the field. Here are some of the biggest moments and stats so far:

The World Cup has been tweeted more than the last Olympics

Major events always see a spike in mentions — the US 2012 elections saw 31-million tweets on voting day, and there were more than 150-million tweets in 16 days during the most recent Olympic Games in London. But the World Cup smashed that — Twitter has seen more than 300-million #WorldCup tweets in the 15 days since the tournament started.

A kiss, Elizabeth?

The most retweeted tweet so far (no, it wasn’t that Snickers one) was sent by Italian forward Mario Balotelli, who put in a cheeky request in case the outcome of his country’s game helped England stay in the tournament which has been viewed over 17-million times.

If we beat Costa Rica i want a kiss,obviously on the cheek, from the UK Queen.

— Mario Balotelli (@FinallyMario) June 19, 2014

The opener is was the biggest match

In real-time stats, the kick-off match between hosts Brazil and visiting Croatia saw the most conversation — 12.2-million tweets. That was followed by Brazil’s match against Mexico (8.95-million tweets) and Germany vs Portugal (8.9-million tweets).

Everyone loves Messi

The most mentioned footballer? That would be Argentina’s Lionel Messi, followed by Brazil’s Neymar Jr. Thanks to that infamous biting incident, Uruguay’s Luis Suárez takes third place.

That own-goal was the biggest moment

The most-tweeted World Cup moment also took place during that opening match, when Brazil’s Marcelo Vieira scored in his own team’s goal and saw Twitter conversation spike to 378 085 tweets per minute. The other big moments were Clint Dempsey’s goal against Portugal that saw the USA take the lead in the match (304 603 tweets per minute), Neymar’s first goal in the opening match against Croatia (280 265 tweets per minute), and Pepe’s red card for head-butting Germany’s Thomas Müller (261 026 tweets per minute).

If the Cup was judged on hashflags, the USA would win

One of Twitter’s custom inventions for the World Cup was the hashflag — a tiny flag icon representing the country users tag in their tweets. By tracking the hashflags, the Twitter team was able to put together a ‘World Cup of Tweets’ based on the most popular ones. So far, the cup would go to the USA (6.2-million mentions), followed by hosts Brazil (4.05-million).