Euro 2012 Twitter Chatter - Spain is Victorious: Infographic

Euro 2012 has come and gone, Spain has won the championship and Fernando Torres has won the Golden Boot.

As we have mentioned in our previous infographics, social media and, more specifically, Twitter, is changing the way fans watch and engage with each other around sports. And Euro 2012 was no different, setting a new sports related - tweets per second record with 15,358 tweets per second - during the final between Spain and Italy on Juan Mata's goal.

theScore.com has produced a new infographic highlighting the Twitter chatter throughout the entire Euro 2012 tournament. Note: this analysis looked at tweets mentioning: "Euro 2012" OR "#Euro2012".



The infographic visualizes the number of tweets-per-day throughout the entire tournament which mentions either Euro 2012 or the official hashtag: #Euro2012.

• Spain was the clear winner with the most tweets about their team/country throughout Euro 2012 with more than 873,000 tweets. A close second, although they were eliminated by Italy in the quarter-finals, was England with 849,000. Italy, who made it to the final, finished third with 716,000 total tweets.

• The heaviest volume of Twitter chatter came on the opening and closing days of the tournament. The next highest peak happened on June 24th when England and Italy squared-off in the quarter-finals.

• The Golden Tweeter (Most mentioned player): Unsurprisingly, Portugal and Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo (@Cristiano) was the most discussed player throughout Euro 2012 with a total of 268,000 tweets, generating a reach of 559 million. Ronaldo had the most followers of any player in the tournament with more than 11.2 million.

 Andres Iniesta (@andresiniesta8) Mid Fielder for Spain tweeted this incredible photo of him and the cup (although it didn't mention Euro 2012 - one tweet was in English and the other in Spanish - collecting over 25,000 retweets and 5,500 favorites.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Mario Balotelli who led Italy to the finals came second with 213,000 tweets. Fernando Torres (@Torres), who won the tournament’s "Golden Boot" for most goals scored, finished third with 188,000. So goals doesn’t equal tweets!

• The Golden Tweet (Most re-tweeted tweet): The most re-tweeted tweet around Euro 2012 did not come from the soccer world at all, it came from the NBA's most social player - LeBron James (@KingJames) from the Miami Heat - with his congratulatory tweet about Spain's Championship win. It collected more than 9,600 re-tweets and more than 1,000 favorites, with a reach upwards of 8.3 million.

• So it may be obvious, but soccer fans love to celebrate goals. So it was no surprise goals were by far the most discussed topic, with more than 457,000 tweets on this topic throughout the tournament. Referees are extremely scrutinized in all sports, and in Euro 2012 the tweets showed just that, with more than 72,000 tweets throughout Euro 2012 mentioning the referees.

Overall Euro 2012 was a social success, with more than 11.9 million tweets during the tournament. Not only did Spain take home the Euro 2012 Championship Trophy, they also took home the Twitter Trophy.

*Note all statistics were as of June 8, 2012 - July 1, 2012 - The duration of the Euro 2012 tournament.

Source: All Twitter data from Sysomos (http://www.sysomos.com)