The Euro 2012 football (or “Soccer” to you Americans out there) tournament is well underway, with each participating country having played at least one match. There have been a few surprises in the results during the early portions of the group stage. The Italians are on the outside looking in as they attempt to advance out of Group C, while the Dutch are scraping against the realm of elimination in the aptly nicknamed “Group of Death” B. Still, even as most squads have played two of their three group stage matches, the Irish are the only nation that have been mathematically eliminated. Adding to the drama, the co-hosting Ukrainian team mounted a shocking comeback victory over Sweden with the help of two successive goals from longtime captain, Andriy Shevchenko.
Working in the digital marketing/advertising space, I was drawn to see the types of engagements happening online for Euro 2012. In particular, activity taking place within the social sphere. Fans from around the globe have united on Twitter to create a tapestry of tweets built from different cultures and languages.
Our Senior Web Architect created a feed on our Social Media display and analytics tool called Zoomph, (www.Zoomph.com) to pull in Tweets for #Euro2012. Within hours tweets were flooding our system and I began to view the prevailing trends of the data.
Below, we have featured a world map describing the tweeting frequency throughout the tournament of users who turned on geolocation settings. No surprises here that England had the most tweets (as illustrated by the red area):
Also captured in our system were the languages of the tweets. Nearly half of the incoming information was written in English, while Portuguese, Polish, Spanish and Italian rounded out the five most used languages. (See below):
It was interesting to see that during the Denmark/Portugal match on June 13th, a visible spike in frequency occurred before and after the match, as well at times when each of the 5 total goals was scored:
“Portugal” was the most popular word associated with #Euro2012 during the match, with “Denmark” not too far behind. Other terms such as “groupofdeath” were used by fans to describe the competitively-stacked Group B, which also consists of fellow European juggernauts Germany and the Netherlands.
With a solid three weeks left until two teams will reach the final, I’m looking forward to the remaining upsets and triumphs the rest of the tournament may hold. ¡Viva La Furia Roja!