Germany-Brazil Was The Most-Tweeted Sporting Event In History

If you are reading this, you probably watched and wondered at Germany's 7-1 brutalizing of Brazil. And there's a good chance you tweeted about it, because it was one of the most stunning outcomes sports has ever seen. If so, you're a little part of history.

Twitter's data team has released some figures on the match, and they're huge. I'm not totally certain how they can tell a soccer tweet from a non-soccer tweet (a keyboard-smashed "AADSFHGHJDFSHJ" around the right time was probably about a Germany goal, but not necessarily), but Twitter says the match shattered two records that earn it the title of the most-tweeted sporting event of all time.

That 35.6 million easily breaks the old record for most tweets during a single event, the 24.9 million sent during this year's Super Bowl.

(By comparison, Facebook's data team says that 66 million people had more than 200 million Facebook "interactions" [posts, comments, likes] during the match.)

The match also set a record for peak Twitter:

That's 580,166 tweets per minute after Germany's fifth goal, or just shy of 10,000 tweets per second. (Which sounds about right; Tweetdeck couldn't scroll fast enough.) That's a new high-water mark, and not just for sports. The old record was 389,000 TPM for Brazil's PK win over Chile in the round of 16, and before that it was 360,000 TPM for Miley Cyrus's infamous VMAs performance.

Here's a screengrab from an interactive rolling heat map of Twitter activity during the match:

Compare it to the same map for USA vs. Ghana. In that one, you could see the action flare up and settle down with each discrete event. Here, once Germany's four-goal, six-minute stretch began, the map is just a raging firestorm that never goes out. (One thing I found interesting—much of the sentiment, even as Germany poured on the goals, was Brazil-specific. I totally get that. In my head, the match will go down as a Brazil loss rather than a Germany win.)

Meanwhile, back in "old media," the match was the most-watched program in the history of German TV, with a mindblowing 87.8 percent share.