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Neymar tops tweet chart as World Cup social media battle kicks off

Brazil hero Neymar topped the Twitter charts as football fans in more than 150 countries sent out 12.2 million tweets during the opening match of a World Cup.

It is set to represent a landmark in the development of social media.

The Barcelona striker’s two goals in Brazil’s controversial 3-1 win over Croatia ensured he was the most mentioned player on the micro-blogging site, according to Twitter’s own monitoring of Thursday night’s big kick-off in Sao Paulo.

Neymar’s performance was a personal triumph, in both footballing and online profile terms.

The spiky-haired 22-year-old added 165,000 followers to his @NeymarJr account over the course of the tournament’s opening day, taking his total following to a heavyweight 11 million.

This World Cup is widely expected to be the most tweeted event ever.

The stats from the first of the 64 matches suggested the tournament will have no trouble exceeding the 150 million tweets sent about the 2012 London Olympics.

Source: AFP