SMALL PRINT:The FIFA Women's World Cup - which came to a thrilling conclusion last Sunday night when Japan edged out the US in a penalty shoot-out – may have come in under the radar, what with attention diverted to the golf. But the fast-growing and universally popular women's game set a Twitter world record during Sunday's final for having the highest rate of tweets per second about any one topic. 7,196 tweets per second to be precise.
This put the Women’s World Cup way ahead of other major Twitter events – such as the death of Osama Bin Laden last May which came in at 5,000-plus tweets per second. And the footballers had more than double the tweets recorded for last April’s British royal wedding which, despite the blanket media coverage, only registered some 3,000 tweets per second.
Even allowing for the fact that some 600,000 new users are signing up for a Twitter account daily – thus more recent events are going to have higher tweets – it’s a sweet victory for the previously marginalised sport of women’s football.
And in a neat twist – the new Twitter record set by the Women’s World Cup was helped along by the number of tweets (mostly from males, it appears) which were complaining about the amount of tweets about women’s football.
