The Hashtag World Cup shows who wins on Twitter

Does the team that wins the World Cup match also win the hearts of Twitter users? Does the winner always generate more talk? Does the larger #brand always have the bigger impact on social media?

The answer to all those questions is: not necessarily.

Creative agency Huge decided to track the social media impact of each World Cup game, as a handy second-screen experience. You can sit and watch the site and see how the hashtags in support of each team are piling up. It’s called The Hashtag World Cup.

In a statement from the company, Huge explained the project:

In advance of the start of the World Cup, a few Huge-ers got together and recorded the most popular hashtags that fans were using on Twitter. We then created a program that scrapes Twitter’s API in real-time to find the relevant hashtags as they are tweeted during each game. As the games progress and hashtags get tallied, each team’s overall social score is displayed as a colorful box. The result allows users to see how much social buzz each team is earning while the game is watched live. 

During games you can watch the ebb and flow of real-time tweeting. Then after it’s all said and done the site generates a final image, rendering the match’s Twitter stats in Huge’s characteristic simplicity and style.

Even if you don’t follow the footie, there are some interesting observations to be made from the final tallies. For example, it’s no surprise, perhaps, that even though Belgium won the day against the USA, we crushed them in the social media game. It’s a small country, after all.

That said, Japan, the nation that yielded the sharpest spike in the history of Twitter (beating even President Obama’s reelection), apparently left their smartphones off during the country’s game against Columbia.

However, small countries didn’t always lose. Ghana was consistently a social media contender, effectively matching Germany in tweets as it also tied the game itself with Europe’s economic powerhouse.

Ghana also made a brave showing against the USA.

Interestingly, when faced with another small country, Portugal, Ghana did not dominate, however. It only tied. Maybe that’s because in the other cases it had more of an underdog appeal? Who knows.

And in further developing-world action, the civic pride of Ivory Coast shone bright, toppling the much larger Colombia in social media attention. Somehow the refs remained unswayed by this fact, awarding the match to Colombia — myopically basing the victory simply on which team had scored the most goals. For shame.

Your last chance to watch the social media firestorm will come this Sunday at 3 p.m., with Germany and Argentina meeting in the World Cup Final.

This reporter will be doing his laundry.