The Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) 2014 World Cup in Brazil is barely a month away. How will you be covering this global news event?
Many marketers have touted this as the first social media World Cup, given the crazy-paced advent of social media in the past few years.
Is your newsroom and marketing team ready to tame this behemoth?
While the previous World Cup in South Africa saw some volume of online chatter, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were significantly smaller four years ago.
From my recollection, the African vuvezela horn and the annoying sound it created was one of the most talked about World Cup topics online.
Imagine another vuvezela-like instrument in Brazil this time around. With meme generators like 9gag, social sharing sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and the explosion of independent online content creators/publishers on channels such YouTube and blogs, the impact will be on an epic scale, never previously seen before.
Facebook has more than 1 billion users now, and Brazil, the host country, has 86 million active users by itself. Globally, the top footballers from around the world are among the top sporting stars in the world, each boasting millions of followers on Twitter and their Facebook fan pages.
The World Cup is one of the only truly global events in this day and age.
The stage is set for some record-breaking social media.
Check out some stunning visuals and stats below, courtesy of IMS:
From the revenue standpoint, ESPN, one of the world’s top sports news networks, is said to be seeing significantly higher advertising sales for June’s 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil versus four years ago, according to Ed Erhardt, ESPN’s president of global customer marketing and sales.
Erhardt expects ESPN to post “significantly greater” ad sales for the Brazil World Cup from June 12 through July 13 than it did for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
From a social media standpoint, he predicts 2014 World Cup will be the “most social event ever,” surpassing the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, 2012 London Summer Olympics, and the 2010 World Cup.
I am not a big football fan, but it is hard not to get excited about the coming World Cup from a marketer and social media practitioner’s point of view!
Let’s see what will be the vuvezula for Brazil 2014 and how much more global it can grow to be.
