With over 44 million Twitter mentions, the Euro 2012 has been the most popular sporting event in history.
While some may say the focus should be purely on the football, the gradual entrenchment of social media into the build-up of sporting events has certainly added another layer of speculation that wasn’t there before.
This year the Euro 2012 final saw more than 15,000 tweets per second when Spain scored its fourth goal in Sunday’s Euro 2012 final, a new sports-related record on the social networking site. To put this into perspective the Super Bowl final only achieved 10,000 tweets per second in its closing moments back in February.
Whilst Spain may have won the Euro’s and had the highest individual team coverage, it was Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo that was the most talked about player throughout the tournament.
Biggest Facebook fan growth during Euro 2012
|
Position |
Name | Country | Fan Growth |
| 1 | Cristiano Ronaldo | 1235k | |
| 2 | Wayne Rooney | 406k | |
| 3 | Mesut Özil | 387k |
Most talked about player on Twitter
|
Position |
Name | Country | No. of Tweets |
| 1 | Cristiano Ronaldo | 1432k | |
| 2 | Andres Iniesta | 660k | |
| 3 | Mesut Özil | 476k |
How did the Sponsors do?
Research by Sysomos found that sports brand Adidas drove the most social media discussion of sponsorship during the group stages of UEFA Euro 2012. Based on the analysis of all online mentions for social media during the group matches, Adidas took a 29 per cent share of the daily discussion on social media regarding the sponsors.
In second place was McDonald’s with 17 per cent, just ahead of Orange with 15 per cent. Orange beat Carlsberg with 12 per cent and impressively, Coca Cola with 10 per cent.
With the impending Olympic Games in London, it is likely that the record of 15,000 tweets per second when Spain scored its fourth goal will not hold for long…
