Facebook declared that Brazil's World Cup "was the biggest social media event on record involving 350 million Facebook Inc users worldwide," as it made strides into the so-called "real-time" market dominated by Twitter, according to Esteban Israel of REUTERS. Figures obtained by Reuters showed that the 350 million users generated a record Facebook "conversation" with 3 billion posts, comments and likes. Facebook Dir of Global Media Partnerships Nick Grudin said, "We knew the World Cup was going to be big, but this level of engagement is remarkable. It was the highest level of conversation around a single event that we have ever measured." The widespread use of mobile phones "that have made social media seemingly ubiquitous helped explain Facebook's record numbers." Brazil's Neymar "led the ranking of most talked about player, followed by Argentina's Lionel Messi, Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo and Uruguay's Luis Suárez" (REUTERS, 7/14). In London, Mark Sweney wrote Twitter said that Germany’s 1-0 victory peaked at 618,725 tweets a minute, "easily breaking the previous record of 580,166 set during the team’s 7-1 demolition of Brazil." However, the total of 32.1 million tweets sent during the game -- tracked on a global heat map as the game progressed -- "failed to break the record" 35.6 milllion set by the Germany-Brazil game. German player Lukas Podolski proved to be something of a one-man Twitter "selfie" phenomenon -- "a shot of teammate Bastian Schweinsteiger kissing his cheek immediately after the victory was retweeted more than 88,620 times and received 78,169 favourites" (GUARDIAN, 7/14).
