The World Cup on Twitter

The World Cup will lead to intensive use of social media. Twitter introduces new features to help you to keep up to date with your team during the competition.

- Michael Walmsley

The World Cup on Twitter

The World Cup will lead to intensive use of social media. Twitter introduces new features to help you to keep up to date with your team during the competition.

- Michael Walmsley

If there is one thing that really sets the social media world alight then it is a worldwide live event and, with the exception of the Olympics, they don’t get bigger than football’s World Cup. Social media gives fans from all over the world the opportunity to share, in real time, their joy and sadness with an extremely large group of like-minded people. With that in mind Twitter has announced a series of World Cup related features that you will be able to use throughout the duration of the competition.

Choose Your Team

To kick off with you can choose the team that you will be supporting in this year’s World Cup. Carry out a search on Twitter for #WorldCup and at the top of the results is a card that offers you updates and behind-the-scenes action. Click on this you are presented with another card at the top of the screen that has a settings icon (it looks like a cog). Click on the icon and select “Choose your side”. You are given the option of the 32 teams flags, so make sure you choose England!

When you move onto the next screen then you can set your profile picture to one that either represents your chosen team or is a more generic World Cup image.

So now that you are displaying your national pride on Twitter we can look at a couple of other features that every football fan will need over the next month.

World Cup Timelines

Twitter has created two specific types of timeline for the World Cup. If you followed the instructions in the “choose your team” section above then you have already seen one of them, the World Cup timeline. This is found by searching for the #WorldCup. The World Cup timeline displays a stream of tweets from those that are in your social network as well as other tweets from the teams, journalists, celebrities and fans in the stadia.

In addition there will also be match timelines during each match of the competition. Each timeline will consist of live tweets during the game. You have the option to view just those tweets that contain photos and videos. As I type this I am thinking of trying an experiment in which my only way of knowing what is happening in a match is through Twitter.

Hashflags

Twitter have reintroduced hashflags after their success during the 2010 World Cup. A hashflag is simply a hashtag placed before one of the three digit country codes for the competing nations. When the tweet is posted a little flag of the respective country is displayed.

An example of a hashflag on Twitter
An example of a hashflag on Twitter

Twitter are going to be totalling up all the hashflags that are used before the start of the World Cup and will announce which has been the most popular. So please get tweeting with the hashflag #ENG!

This World Cup will undoubtedly see more interactions via social media than any other previous World Cup and I, for one, can’t wait.