For nearly two hours on Thursday, Twitter's list of worldwide trending topics was dominated by hashtags like #GermanyvsUSA and #PORGHA for the two World Cup matches taking place. When Cristiano Ronaldo scored a goal for Portugal, the phrase "finally Ronaldo" started trending. When it was determined that the U.S. would advance to the next round to play Belgium, "USA vs Belgium" entered the list.
If you glanced at Facebook's trending section around the same time, however, you might not have realized either match was under way. When I checked Facebook halfway through the USA match, the top trending topic in my feed was about one of the players on Ghana's soccer team getting suspended, followed by a headline about North Korea's leader declaring actor Seth Rogen's latest movie an "act of war." The first news item had broken several hours before the game; the second had gained attention a day earlier.
Then again, you might have seen a completely different list of trending topics. Unlike Twitter, Facebook customizes its trending topics for each user based on factors like your location, age, gender and Pages you like as well as what's trending across the social network overall. Regardless of whether you Like soccer-related pages on Facebook, you should still see World Cup trending topics simply because there's an incredibly high volume of posts about it.
So why is it that there often appears to be a lag between news events trending on Twitter and on Facebook? To some extent, it's by design.
Trending topics don't just surface organically on Facebook as they do on Twitter. Facebook relies on a combination of algorithms and human editors to identify trending news, pick an appropriate headline and description and link the trending topic to a particular article. One source familiar with Facebook's thinking also told us that the social network doesn't believe it's a great user experience to have trending topics that change every few seconds in the way you might see on Twitter.
In practice, that means when a newsworthy incident from a live event occurs â€" for example, Luis Suarez biting an Italian soccer player â€" it will surface quickly in Twitter trends just based on user activity, but it won't trend on Facebook until at least some news articles have been written about it. On the other hand, that Suarez trending topic may live on Facebook significantly longer than it will on Twitter to ensure it gets viewed by the relevant audience.
Yet, it's also likely Facebook will miss many other smaller moments from a live event both because of this approach and by virtue of its users' behavior. It's not unusual to see active Twitter users share dozens of updates in a day, and at least that many during a big live event like the World Cup. Every score change, every questionable referee call, every collision between players and every closeup of a bad haircut in the course of a game can be fodder for a trending moment on Twitter. But on Facebook, it's far more likely you'll just see a trending topic about who won.
To put that another way: On Twitter, the real-time conversation around a big event like the World Cup can be difficult to escape. On Facebook, it can be difficult to find.
That might not come as too much of a shock to some readers. After all, "real-time" discussions have been an integral part of Twitter's DNA from the start. Throughout the past year though, Facebook has borrowed pages from Twitter's real time playbook: It introduced hashtags last June and rolled out trending topics at the beginning of this year. Facebook also felt compelled to introduce a dedicated World Cup hub to better showcase more of that real-time conversation, though you have to know to look for it.
The assumption is that Facebook introduced these features in order to better compete with Twitter in the real-time marketing space. If that's the case, the World Cup shows Facebook still has some work cut out for it.
Perhaps the biggest real-time moment from the World Cup so far was the Suarez biting incident. Within minutes, many big and small brands were trying to turn the bizarre event into a clever marketing opportunity on Twitter, where it was all anyone was talking about.
Some brands, like Snickers, did also try sharing their Suarez-related posts on Facebook, but as you can see in the tweet above, it received far less engagement there despite having a significantly larger audience.
"Twitter is a more efficient place to do it because it's where everybody is during the course of the game," Zach Pentel, director of digital strategy for BBDO New York, which represents Snickers and other brands, says of sharing real-time content. "Facebook is for extended commentary between friends."
Other brand reps we spoke with tended to agree.
"Since the organic in-the-moment conversation around the World Cup really lives on Twitter, we built our World Cup promotion strategy there," says Sean Ryan, the social and mobile director for JC Penney. "Twitter offers a fast-paced, real-time conversation tool, whereas Facebook offers a highly curated presentation targeted to the end user. There are benefits to both."
The benefit for brands and users on Twitter is that tweets tied to trending topics can spike in popularity very quickly, though they often tend to fizzle out quickly and may not be relevant to many of the users who see them. The benefit for brands and users on Facebook is that posts tied to big events can have a longer shelf life, though it takes longer to bubble up and it usually needs to bigger news items. For example, a brand congratulating the U.S. soccer team for winning can do quite well on Facebook, but riffing on a referee's call in the first half of the game won't.
"If you carefully craft a 'Congratulations U.S.' post and put it on Twitter, its half life is two hours whereas on Facebook it can last longer," Pentel says. "So you see brands spending more time crafting a thoughtful response that they can put up on Facebook."
Indeed, Facebook's biggest asset over Twitter and other rival social networks is its scale, thanks to its billion-plus user base. Facebook revealed to Mashable that there were 815 million interactions â€" Likes, posts, comments â€" about the World Cup from more than 200 million users during the group stages. By comparison, Twitter announced on Friday that there were 300 million tweets related to the World Cup during the group stages. Twitter did not share a comparable "interactions" metric.
Facebook would likely say many of those posts and interactions do qualify as "real-time" in the sense that they're connected to live events, but the trending topics tell a different story.
"Maybe it's a different notion for real time," says Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "I think the expectation people have when they use Twitter is that it's actually real time. Facebook's News Feed surfaces only the most popular news stories and it takes awhile for popularity to coalesce."
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