Facebook and Twitter add World Cup features!

Twitter and Facebook know soccer. Well, they know their social sites have a multitude of soccer fans, making them compete for World Cup conversation. Why is this important? Because now they are vying for soccer fans attention with new features, making it a lot easier to follow along.

Twitter’s new #worldcup features:

If you don’t have a Twitter account already, now might be a good time to get tweeting. When signing up you can now choose your favorite teams flag as your profile image.

The best feature that Twitter has rolled out is the major timeline for the #worldcup. From this one link you can find up to date scoreboards, custom timelines for each separate match and “HashFlags.”

A Hashflag is when you hashtag a three letter code for a country, that country’s flag will appear alongside it.

Facebook’s new #worldcup features:

The trending world cup page which is dedicated to scores, news from matches and feeds of players and team pages - not to worry, your facebook updates will also show in the world cup hub on Facebook.

Along with the hub, Facebook has put together a “Fan Map”, not imperative to the watching of the world cup, but cool nonetheless. Here you can check out where they top player’s fans come from.

Our thoughts:

Since Twitter apparently crashed in 2010 due to the overwhelming number of people tweeting during the World Cup (aprox. 150,000 tweets were being sent per minute), we think the timelines are a brilliant idea. The world cup generates more traffic than the Olympics - 3.2 billion people watched at least one minute in 2010, that’s a lot of soccer fans. With Twitter and Facebook being more conscious of soccer fans, they are making it easier to indulge in the “world sport” and socialize together. If you can’t watch it while at work, tune into Facebook and Twitter and watch the score boards and the timelines for all your world cup updates.

Pro Tip: The hashflags don’t show on the Twitter mobile app. But, still use them because they will show on desktop. Rookie move by twitter!

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