World Cup dominating social chatter

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (or you don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account), it would be hard to miss what’s going on with the World Cup. Around 80% of the world’s population has been watching the games and you can imagine how this has impacted productivity in the workplace. When games are played, social networks are buzzing with World Cup chatter (even causing Twitter to go down at times).

On Twitter, fans are tweeting about everything from teams, players, coaches, and even those annoying vuvuzelas (and by the way, there is an equally annoying Vuvuzela iPhone/iPad app if you’re interested). Mashable has been updating the Top 10 World Cup Twitter Trends on a weekly basis. From there you can see the most tweeted teams and players. It’s interesting to see how these change from week to week as teams are eliminated from play.

Facebook revealed some interesting graphs/charts that illustrate trends among status updates. In the image below, the spikes in the graph are where users used the word “goal” in their status updates on Facebook.

The chart below show the frequency of Facebook status messages during the England-US match. About 30 percent of all status updates on Facebook during the course of that match included a word relevant to the World Cup.

The thing that I have enjoyed the most about social media during the World Cup is that when I don’t have access to a TV, I can follow along on Facebook/Twitter and know what exactly is happening (score, close shots, bad calls, etc.).

Have you been following the World Cup through social networks? What do you think?