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Cape Town - In the ongoing battle for eyeballs between social media giants, Facebook has declared a victory after the UEFA Champions League final.
While FC Barcelona delivered Juventus a crushing victory on the field, Facebook saw a spike in conversations as fans turned to the social media giant to talk about the action on the pitch.
Facebook said that 28 million people drove 76 million interactions with goal-scorer Neymar getting the most mentions.
Here are the top countries that spiked Facebook traffic during the final:
1. Brazil
2. Italy
3. Indonesia
4. Mexico
5. US
Spain was in sixth position as a peak number of 400 000 people per minute engaged on Facebook when Neymar scored the match winner.
However, regional differences in the way fans talked about their stars. Predictably, Neymar was the most talked about player, but in Spain and Italy, fellow striker Lionel Messi dominated social media.
Here are the top five players who generated the most conversation on Facebook:
1. Neymar
2. Lionel Messi
3. Luis Suárez
4. Ivan Rakitic
5. Andrea Pirlo
On Twitter, the social media landscape showed that the final generated 834 million impressions or views on the micro-blogging platform.
For the teams these were the most popular on Twitter:
Barcelona:
Neymar
Lionel Messi
Luis Suarez
Juventus:
Andrea Pirlo
Arturo Vidal
Alvaro Morata
Topsy analytics showed that tweets for Barcelona peaked at one million, versus about 700 000 for Juventus. Twitter statistics also showed that Neymar's goal was the most popular moment of the match.
Facebook data also showed that soccer is universally popular with millennials, though skewed toward men.
Here are the top demographics:
1. Men, 18-24
2. Men, 25-34
3. Women, 18-24
4. Men, 13-17
5. Women, 25-34
- Follow Duncan on Twitter
