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REACHING AND INSPIRING NEW AUDIENCES#RWC2015SO MUCH MORE THAN A HASHTAGRugby World Cup 2015 will go down historically, to this date, as the ‘most socially and digitally engaged sporting event of all time’.RWC 2015 reached and inspired new interest and love in the game both in hardened strongholds and brand new markets where rugby had never before registered on the interest scale. The tournament’s website – www.rugbyworldcup.com – and video views doubled those of the London 2012 Olympic Games. Where London 2012 had attracted 16 million web users, Rugby World Cup 2015 enticed 28 million. Where the Olympics’ digital platforms garnered 150 million video views, RWC 2015’s had 400 million. For the first time the digital and social offering was delivered in English, French, Spanish and Japanese, with Argentina and Japan among the top five engaged audiences.And this global tribe of followers was further strengthened, informed and entertained by the official RWC App, which was downloaded 2.8 million times, in 204 of the world’s 206 nations. In fact, quiz-makers will delight in the fact that only in Kiribati and North Korea was the App not downloaded. Further to these digital advances and many more besides, it is a quite remarkable fact that the tournament’s hashtag #RWC2015 was used twice every second throughout the six weeks. Take a moment to think about that. From conception through to implementation, #RWC2015 was consumed by more than 300 million unique users on social channels and was an integral player in the fan experience. But this digital and social success wasn’t just about astronomical numbers, it took fan engagement to a new level for a global event. For the first time at a Rugby World Cup, App alerts were sent not to everyone but to pockets of people based on their location and preferences. Travel alerts were issued to people heading to over-crowded stations, team updates were sent along with welcome news of the availability of live audio match commentary or match highlights of the game you might just have missed. In the social sphere there were 6.8 billion tweet impressions. That’s a big number and #RWC2015 was, in fact, the most spoken about sporting hashtag on Twitter in 2015. But behind all of these statistically-driven claims and headlines genuine rugby fans and new audiences from around the globe were allowed to feel closer to the stars on the pitch than ever before.And how they were entertained, with 5.4 million minutes of video watched in all. New Zealand’s hakas were uploaded almost as they finished to top the video views with 18 million watching their first challenge performed against Argentina on Facebook alone. The post marking Japan’s incredible win against South Africa had more than 2.5 million impressions, 14,300 retweets and over 10,000 likes. Thanks to World Rugby’s unrivalled access to footage, Diego Maradona’s keepy-uppies in the Pumas’ changing room became something of a phenomenon, transcending rugby and football. On Snapchat the story of the final was viewed 91 million times, while there were even 15 million downloads of Shaun the Sheep RWC stickers. And as a result of all of this, World Rugby’s social platforms mushroomed in follower numbers: Facebook likes from 2.71 million to 4.4 million; Twitter followers from 403,916 to 683,000; Instagram from 280,000 to 515,000, making it the biggest rugby account in the world reaching out mostly to 12-17 year olds. And then YouTube, where World Rugby doubled its subscriber numbers from 90,000 to 180,000 in the six weeks.It is tempting to point to the stats in all of this but only when you take time to think of all those millions of people engaged through their mobile, tablet, laptop or smart TV, do you realise that it’s about so much more than a hashtag.34 WORLD RUGBY YEAR IN REVIEW 2015RUGBY WORLD CUP 2015 | SOCIAL AND DIGITALPICTURED Argentina’s Agustín Creevy takes a selfie with fans after the match against Georgia