The mighty roar of the World Cup fans in social media

I am not much of a club-football fan (or soccer to you Americans), but I do love watching the World Cup and the European Cup! This year, I followed the games even more intensely. I wanted to see what people were talking about in Social Media. I set up all the teams’ Facebook-pages in our Facebook Monitor-tool and sat back to let it crunch the numbers for me. But before I could gather the data to write a blogpost, I left for a vacation to Turkey. The hotel I stayed at turned out to be a popular destination for Germans. Being with several hundred Germans when Germany advanced to the finals was fun! The hotel actually screened the finals on a big screen outside. And boy – did people roar when Götze scored the winning goal. Not only at our hotel in Turkey, but all over the world.

Between july 13th (the match-day) and in the following days, the Facebook-page of the German team, managed to engage 118% of their fans. Having nearly 4 million fans actively engaging with content they posted. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. 4 million!

From july 12th up to today – they’ve grown their fanbase by an astonishing 683,000 new fans, with 296,272 new fans on the match-day itself.

The Germans were also eager to keep their fans up to date on what was going on:

And with the support of their fans, and Götze, Germany went on to be “Weltmeister” or World Champions.

At 24SevenSocial, some of us are real football heads. So naturally – we watched the Germany vs. Brazil game too. I, myself have been rooting for Germany since the games started. Congrats to Germany on the win – but who won on Facebook? Let’s dig into the numbers.

The numbers above show the amount of posts made by each page. Blue represents Germany, and green represents Brazil. It seems that both teams did a great job hyping the game beforehand. But it also seems that the Brazilian team got silent the day before and at the day of the game. Nerves, anyone?

This is actually a trend we’ve gotten used to seeing in times of struggle for brands, sports teams and political parties alike. Silence is a natural reflex in times of struggle, but is it a reflex that helps us move on or does it just hurt the brands more? Silence can mean that you’re listening, or that you really don’t have anything valuable to say. Or that you understand why people rant, and you figure it’s best to let them, and then let it die down. Either way, keep in mind that silence is also communication. What we *have* seen is that understanding rather then going into defense mode is most often the best move. It should never be you versus your customers. You should be wanting the same thing. For Brazil, that’s victory. For a brand, that’s happy customers who stay loyal and buy more.

To all social media admins, community- and page managers, we feel your struggle. Loosing-teams-page admins – we’re with you in this time of hardship. You’ll bounce back, we’ve got faith.

Want to talk to us about Facebook Page management? Click here, and we’ll get in touch.