The World Cup Blur

If you're looking for information overload, head straight for the World Cup in Brazil. Or, at least, to your Twitter feed.

Here's an animated snapshot of what the Twitter feed for "World Cup" looked like during the Brazil vs. Cameroon game. Yes, that's in real time. And it's only a random sample of 20 seconds. Good luck getting anything meaningful out of it even after several passes (no World Cup pun intended).

In Jetsons' terms, this is definitely "Jane, stop this crazy thing!" territory. Here's one reason why:  hashtags. The very element that makes Twitter tick, hashtags, becomes self-defeating when everyone on earth who has a Twitter acccount and likes soccer (a.k.a. football a.k.a. futebol, etc.) will tag their tweets with #worldcup. Yes, I do this, too. If 71 percent of the tens of millions of tweets during key matches contain the exact same hashtag, of course, overload is absolutely guaranteed.

© Based on Best hashtags for worldcup calculated by

The solution? Well, I suppose you could actually just watch the game.

If you're trying to get something out of the tweets, then try to find the most meaningful follow you have and stick with that instead of starting with a hashtag.

If you're a marketer trying to leverage the World Cup mania on Twitter, go ahead and add that #worldcup hashtag. In your quest to stick out in the crowd, I wish you more luck than the Cameroon goalie had against Neymar.



Tools of the Trade

The maddeningly fast Twitter feed was captured using Reflector and AirPlay mirroring on iOS 7, then edited in Camtasia, converted to an animated GIF using ZAMZAR free online file conversion.

"Twitter hashtags for worldcup" is embedded from ritetag.com.