I love how the world is so interconnected! Yes, it excites me how with just a hashtag, you can literally follow what everybody globally is saying about a particular subject. People love to connect, especially when it’s an event of epic proportions. For example sports, sports are very popular platforms that bring all and sundry to the altar of social relationships.
Wimbledon has been on the lips of avid fans since the start of the season, and the love poured out to Facebook and Twitter. Andy Murray who was the first British to win a title in 77 years, was retweeted a whooping 77,000 times according to a blogpost that Twitter shared.
The biggest coincidence is, that he won on 7.7.2013, was retweeted 77,000 in one hour, after being the first British to win in 77 years! During the time of his win, eight out of the top ten trending topics in the UK were about Wimbledon.
According to Twitter, in the last 12 hours alone prior, the Wimbledon final was mentioned more than 3.4 million times on Twitter. The peak in mentions of the match came at its climax at 17.25 BST with 120,000 Tweets per minute. That outstripped the 116,000 Tweets per minute that happened during the Spice Girls’ performance at last summer’s Olympics, a moment that saw the largest spike in Tweets per minute of the London 2012 Games.
Twitter reports that Murray saw his follower numbers sky rocket, adding more than 131,000 followers over the last day, and seeing a 20% increase in follower numbers over the course of the championships. There is already talk of him being knighted. He currently has 1.95 million twitter followers.
According to BBC.com, Twitter recorded more than 6.6 million tweets about Wimbledon during the two-week tennis championships. During last year’s tournament, it was 2.5 million, according to analysis by Wimbledon partner IBM.
Facebook reported more than 20 million posts, comments and “likes” relating to the competition. On the same day, Google recorded more than two million searches for match winner Andy Murray.
During the same time period, more than 500,000 people googled his girlfriend Kim Sears. The Facebook profile of Murray’s rival Novak Djokovic attracted 3.1 million “likes”. That was three times as many as Murray, who had 1.3m at the time of writing.
Just to show you why people love Andy, it is rumored that he donated all of his winnings to cancer research. He then took to twitter to answer random question from his Facebook fans, using the hashtag #AskAndy.
