Much like everyone else, in an effort to capitalize on World Cup fever Twitter and Facebook have set-up special initiatives to get fans more involved with the action-on-the-pitch. Twitter will have specialized feeds that will collect and collate all the best Tweets from major football news sources around the World.
These feeds can simply be located via the #WorldCup hashtag which will lead you straight to the official Twitter accounts of participating nations, as well as log live scores for each match. Moreover, ‘hashflags’ will make their return to the Twitter-sphere. By simply using #GER for Germany or #ENG for England for example, their respective flags will appear in your tweets. During the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, certain matches yielded a staggering 3000 tweets per second and we’re now expecting those records to be smashed!
Facebook is taking the hype to a whole new level by setting up a hub titled ‘Trending World Cup’, which will be THE go-to destination for all Cup-related news, scores and updates from both players and their teams. The social media giant wants to serve as a virtual hub for the 40% of their estimated 1.28 billion users that are football fanatics…
Every football-related post by you and your friends will be picked up by Facebook’s ‘Trending area’ which is accessible via the news feed. You’ll know which matches are being followed and be able to provide your own updates by just clicking the ‘smiley’ icon that was previously utilized to share things like watching a film.
A dedicated page titled ‘Facebook Ref’ will be home to ‘The Ref’, the social networking giant’s official World Cup commentator who will offer minute-by-minute coverage. In order to benefit from the global hype Facebook has also initiated an interactive map to provide users with detailed information of where fans following the biggest stars of the tournament belong to. The map is set to give you detailed location information like country and city, and allows for you to form new friendships with fans of the same players.
If you decide to pursue live-blogging on either (or both) of these hugely-popular platforms, then these new features should greatly enhance your user experience. It’s an extremely exciting time as we countdown the hours till kick-off of the World’s biggest sporting extravaganza where every goal, every miss, every foul and every penalty will yield reactions on social media.
For the next month expect the two biggest players in the social media game to be buzzing with goals!