The 2014 FIFA World Cup has just kicked off, and after the opening match it’s already a bigger phenom than this year’s Academy Awards on social networks.
According to Facebook, the opening match Thursday — Brazil’s 3-1 defeat of Croatia — drove more than 140 million interactions among 58 million people. That’s nearly five times as many posts as ABC’s Oscars telecast in March.
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Twitter, meanwhile, said the Brazil-Croatia match produced 12.2 million tweets during the live telecast worldwide. By comparison, during the Oscars, 2.8 million unique users posted a total of 11.2 million event-related tweets, according to Twitter — led by Ellen DeGeneres’ much-retweeted staged selfie.
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Facebook chatter about World Cup opener was led by 16 million Brazilian users — about 30% of the active users in the country — who had more than 40 million interactions about the match. The next most-active countries for the match were the U.S., England, Indonesia and France.
According to Facebook, the most active demo during the Brazil-Croatia match was men 18-24.
Twitter, which said users in more than 150 countries tweeted about the match, said that Brazilian star Neymar (@NeymarJr) was the most-tweeted-about player during the match. Neymar gained over 165,000 followers the day of the match, which is 10 times more than his normal daily follower growth average. Neymar now has more than 11 million Twitter followers.
