During the last World Cup in 2006, Twitter had just a few thousands users. Now they have 125 million users sending 65 million tweets a day — and 65% of those users are outside the U.S. As such, they’ve created a special section on twitter.com to highlight this year’s version of the sporting event that brings the world together.
This section highlights the key matches coming up as well as top tweets from Twitter accounts affiliated with soccer in some way. Notably, each World Cup matchup will get its own page and live-updating tweet stream about that particular game. For example, here’s South Africa vs. Mexico.
But the coolest thing may be the way you can show your allegiance to one team using a special hashtag. Twitter only hints at this feature, but as you can see, employees are already using it. In this tweet from Twitter’s Vitor Lourenço, he’s clearly rooting for Brazil, and you can see the Brazilian flag in the tweet. How did he do that? Simply use the hashtag “#BRA”.
Twitter also has new special backgrounds for the World Cup that members can decorate their profiles with. It’s also worth noting that “England and Spain have banned Twitter usage by players during the World Cup,” according to Twitter.
Update: Also cool, the country flags link back to the special Twitter World Cup pages built for that country. For example, see my tweet here and click on the U.S. flag.
