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Twitter breaks record with Brazil soccer tragedy

The hammering of the event's hosts by Germany has been the most discussed sports game ever.
Written by Angelica Mari, Contributing Writer

As well as the whole of Germany, the folks at Twitter must be laughing after the latest World Cup event — at least when it comes to business.

The shocking 7-1 victory of Germany over Brazil on Tuesday was not only an historic event in soccer terms, but also for Twitter as it became the most discussed sports event ever in the social networking platform.

According to Twitter itself, who measured social media traffic during every moment of the game in TPM (tweets per minute), some 36.6m tweets were posted about the event yesterday and Germany's fifth goal was the peak moment at 580,166 TPM.

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By comparison, the latest Super Bowl event, previously considered the most popular event on Twitter, generated 185 million interactions from 50 million people.

As well as the stats, the company also published a "heat map" of the Brazil-Germany match, which tracked keywords mentioned during the event.

The heat map suggests that Germany top scorer Miroslav Klose — who has already scored 16 goals in the competition, the latest being last night — was the most mentioned player in the platform.

Twitter has introduced dedicated World Cup features such as hashtags and a range of "hash flags" to better engage users prior to the start of the tournament — something that was swiftly followed by Facebook.

Since real-time conversations are at the very core of Twitter, the massive peak in activity within the platform during the World Cup was only to be expected.

Other highlights in terms of Twitter usage included the Brazil match against Chile, when 16.4 million tweets sent during the game. The platform was also used by 59 percent of soccer fans during the World Cup opening match, according to a Global Web Index study.

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