The Rugby World Cup will begin on September 8 next to the Stade de France, with a match at the top between the Blues and New Zealand. This will be the start of a long competition, which a majority of French people obviously intend to follow, according to a joint study by Odoxa and Meta.
Meta is a partner of the event, a first for the American group of Mark Zuckerberg in terms of sport.
The French ready to take the ball with the leap
Only a dozen days left before the start of the 2023 Rugby World Cup, a competition in which France is the favorite alongside Ireland and South Africa. The first match will oppose the XV of France to the All Blacks, a legendary team if ever there was one. It will be such an event that the French Rugby Federation is keeping an eye out for any hacking attempt.
Meta is a partner of the event, and as such, the company presented a whole system allowing its users to experience and share the event, in particular through the “superfan” characters. The latter, in the colors of the countries involved, will be integrated into Meta applications (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram) and available alongside filters on Facebook and Instagram.
To find out more, Facebook’s parent company commissioned a survey from Odoxa, which delivered its results after interviewing 2,092 people aged 15 and over. Laurent Solly, President of Facebook France, presented the importance of this partnership for the group in terms of engagement and exchange of messages, explaining that 25 million messages were sent every second during the FIFA Cup final. football world of 2022.
Suffice to say that the people involved in this partnership were able to breathe when they saw the results arrive, because according to them, 84% of French people have a positive image of the oval ball. This would make it possible to highlight the values of the collective (88% of respondents) and conviviality (80%). Moreover, 58% of those questioned would plan to follow the competition, compared to 39% during the World Cup in Japan in 2019.
Social networks at the heart of the “hype”
As we know, for a large number of people following the competitions, part of the pleasure comes either from being physically gathered in a given place, or from exchanging live on social networks. This is why Meta got involved and commissioned the survey that interests us. For Laurent Solly, the data shows that rugby holds a special place in the hearts of the French, and that the group had therefore hit the mark. Of the estimated 13 or 14 million followers, the study estimates that 48% of our fellow citizens will use social networks to talk about it.
This percentage varies according to the age group and goes up to 80% for 15-24 year olds. In detail, we discover that people who use social networks will first talk about the different results (61%), then the matches themselves (38%), and finally the comments made and the photos taken (29 %).
Unsurprisingly, it is Facebook which, with 61% of the votes, comes first among the platforms which should be used the most, and more generally Meta, since Instagram is in second position. These networks are followed by YouTube (the favorite network of young people), WhatsApp, Messenger, X.com (Twitter) (17%), TikTok, Snapchat, Telegram, Twitch (4%), Discord and Reddit. As for 15-24 year olds, Instagram takes the top step of the podium, followed by Facebook and Tiktok.
Sources: TheMediaLeader, Odoxa
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