When Juan Mata scored the fourth goal in the 2012 European Championship Final between Spain and Italy, not only was it the final confirmation that Spain will be once again crowned European Football Champions. The goal triggered thousands of tweets on the microblogging site, setting a new sports event-related record on Twitter at 15,358 tweets per second.
The football match also resulted in 16.5 million tweets being sent from Twitter users across the world.
The previous tweets per second — sport event related — record was made during the last minutes of the American Football Superbowl final between the New York Giants and the New England patriots in February this year.
The all time tweets per second record of 25,088 — overall — happened during a Japanese television showing of the Anime movie “Castle in the Sky” by popular director Hayou Miyazaki.
This is a an interesting revelation as it continues to illustrate how people continue to watch TV and simultaneously interact with others on social networks.
In the Euro 2012 blog post, the microblogging site also released a visualisation of how users the competing nations. The data visualisation shows how often all of the teams were mentioned as the tournament progressed and during each match.
Of interest is how the amount of tweets spike sharply when goals are scored.
With the African Cup of Nations taking place in South Africa next year, it will be interesting to follow statistics on social networks to see how active African football fans are on various social networks.
