Earlier last month, we mentioned how the 2014 World Cup was slated to be the biggest social event in online history.  Now, with Germany as the new champion, we see that not only did the World Cup break all social media records, it shattered them.  

Over the course of its month-long run, Facebook says The World Cup inspired an incredible 3 billion World Cup posts, comments, and likes.  In its initial week, the tournament elicited 459 million Facebook interactions, which alone beats the numbers from this year’s Superbowl, the Academy Awards, and the Sochi Winter Olympics combined.  In fact, Sunday’s final alone inspired 32.1 million tweets (averaging 618,000 tweets per minute) and 88 million people to engage in 280 million Facebook interactions, again beating last year’s Superbowl by a whopping 35 million. 

The FIFA official app also broke records when its 28 millions downloads made it the biggest sports-event app to date.  It is estimated that by the end, FIFA’s Facebook page reached 451 millions users and its Instagram account went from 42,000 to roughly 1 million followers.  In rough estimation, nearly 1 billion people were in attendance for the World Cup thanks to online social platforms. 

FIFA’s accomplishment is truly amazing, but it was only through social media that these numbers were possible.  Bringing about a “world event” is a difficult task: after all, how do you connect so many different countries at once, and THEN keep them all updated?  Only by online notifications, engagement, and user retweets and reposts could such a goal happen (pun intended). 

This World Cup had a lot going for it: team and individual player selfies, Luis Saurez exposing cannibalistic tendencies, Cristiano Ronaldo’s hair, Tim Howard coming second to Jesus for the most saves in history, and not to mention the matches themselves.  And thanks to social media, everyone had an equal chance to share in this historic event, stay updated with each development, and engage with fans and foes alike across the world in online gatherings.  Without a doubt, this World Cup was the most global one ever.  

 

Original Article appeared on Cnn.com