Germany may have won the final match on Sunday, but there’s another World Cup showdown that is still being decided: Facebook vs. Twitter.
Just before the World Cup games kicked off last month, the two social networks each took steps to become the hub for real-time conversation about the world’s biggest live sporting event.
Both Facebook and Twitter have released impressive-sounding stats throughout the games, noting that several matches set new records for engagement. It certainly sounds momentous, but then again the social networks will only continue to have more record-setting moments as they continue to get bigger. Did anyone expect either to fall below the benchmarks they hit four years ago?
On Monday morning, Facebook announced that there were 3 billion interactions — Likes, comments, posts — from 350 million users throughout the entire World Cup. By comparison, Twitter announced late Monday that users shared 672 million tweets related to the World Cup throughout the tournament, though that’s not exactly comparable to interactions.
In the aggregate, it would seem Facebook is the clear winner. After all, there were more people talking about the World Cup on Facebook than there are monthly active users on Twitter. But given Facebook’s scale — it’s user base is about five times the size of Twitter— that outcome was pretty much guaranteed. In reality, Facebook and Twitter may have been playing a similar game, but they were competing for different things.
For Twitter, the stakes throughout the World Cup were particularly high. Since going public in November, Twitter’s stock has been hammered by investors who are concerned about the social network’s engagement and slow pace of user growth. Multiple analysts predicted that the World Cup games would help this problem, at least in the short term.
“Twitter probably needed it more [than Facebook] from a business standpoint and an investment community standpoint,” says Shyam Patil, an analyst with Wedbush. “They have focused on live events and there was no bigger live event this year. I think they benefitted from it.”
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User growth and engagement hasn’t exactly been a top concern for Facebook, which is already the largest social network in the world. Instead, the World Cup served as an opportunity for Facebook to prove itself as a real-time platform and lure away some of the conversation and marketing efforts from Twitter.
Facebook may have enjoyed some remarkable engagement during the games, but analysts and marketers we spoke with in recent weeks suggested the World Cup didn’t do all that much to assert it as a true real-time platform.
“[T]he organic in-the-moment conversation around the World Cup really lives on Twitter,” Sean Ryan, social and mobile director for JC Penney, told Mashable in an earlier interview. “We built our World Cup promotion strategy there.”
The memes, marketing moments and milestones throughout the games played out on Twitter first and foremost. One can call that a victory of sorts, but it may be a short-lived triumph.
“People sign up and they are engaged during certain events, but over time they sort of fizzle out,” Patil says, noting that the challenge for Twitter will be maintaining the interest of new and existing users who became more active during the World Cup. “People need a reason to tweet.”
As it stands, neither Facebook nor Twitter may get exactly what they want to from the World Cup, but both enjoyed a nice boost in activity from users and brands and neither suffered a major outage or other bad press. So perhaps we should just declare it a win for both.
We’ll have a better sense of just how much the World Cup activity helped engagement and user growth when Twitter and Facebook report earnings later this month. Until then, it seems safe to say that both social networks are likely sad to see the games come to an end.
Date: July 14, 2014