With the World Cup in full force, marketers across the globe are looking for ways to make their brands relevant during arguably the largest worldwide sporting event. One way that successful marketers capitalize on a global phenomenon like the World Cup is to find ways to target their marketing campaigns to soccer fanatics. Social media marketers are no different except that they have the advantage of being able to use social media to understand what will resonate with their audiences. For example, I decided to capitalize on the biggest rivalry in this year’s World Cup, Brazil vs Argentina head to head and did some social media analysis to take a look at both of their fanbases. While the play on the field for both teams hasn’t been spectacular, Argentina has been eliminated and Brazil is on the bubble, a social media analysis is still able to provide me with crucial data that I can use to help target my marketing campaigns to those fans.

argentina and brazil flags world cup

Social Media Analysis to Become a Better Marketer

So how does this work? How can a social media analysis help you become a better marketer? Knowing what brands resonate better with your audience, or potential audience, can help you understand how to position your product, service or whatever it is that you are selling.

For example, if you are a luxury automotive brand and you want to know which fans would react well to World Cup-focused marketing content, how can you determine which one to choose? Using my study, I was able to determine that Argentinian soccer fans are more likely to be fans of mid-range car brands like Kia rather than luxury brands like Audi and BMW. However, according to my social media analysis, fans of Brazil are more likely to want to drive an Audi, BMW or Mercedes-Benz.

What about technology brands? Social media analysis can help you understand how your audience relates to tech companies, or in a situation like this one where you are comparing and contrasting multiple audiences, it is incredibly helpful when trying to see which fans are more tech-focused. The answer is that Argentinian soccer fans are more likely to respond well to a tech brand since four of their five top interactive brands are technology companies (YouTube, Yahoo, Apple and Amazon). On the flip side, Brazil fans are more travel-focused with three of their top five focusing on travel and hospitality brands.

Combining Social Media Analysis with Social Listening Data

While social media analysis is incredibly helpful when used by itself, it can also be even more powerful when combined with social listening data.

If you want to take your social media analysis and then add on to it to see what kind of brands accumulate the most buzz and positive reaction by fans of the World Cup, then social listening tools can help. For example, I was able to determine that the top five mentioned FIFA World Cup 2018 sponsors were:

  1. Adidas (28.51% of all mentions)
  2. Coca-Cola (19.28%)
  3. Budweiser (17.54%)
  4. Vivo (10.92%)
  5. Hyundai (10.13%)

Knowing how much buzz is being created is great, but it’s only a piece of the pie, as the full picture comes from adding sentiment to that equation. For that, I used Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score (SRS), which is an algorithm that combines volume of mentions with sentiment to create a score from 0-100 for each topic that you are monitoring. Based on SRS, the top five FIFA World Cup 2018 sponsors that are seeing positive returns are:

  1. Vivo (an SRS of 68.63%)
  2. McDonald’s (64.54%)
  3. Coca-Cola (60.24%)
  4. Budweiser (59.79%)
  5. Adidas (58.94%)

So what does all of this mean? Knowing that Vivo is a tech company that makes smartphones, and knowing that Argentina soccer fans are more likely to connect with a tech company, a brand can use this information to refocus their marketing campaigns and try to make a splash in the crowded World Cup marketing pool. At the end of the day, marketers are always looking for a leg up on their competition. There is perhaps no better way to do this than by conducting audience insights before every campaign, especially when it’s focused on a major global event that will be generating lots of noise from many other marketers too.