2016 ITTF World Table Tennis Championships Smash All Social & Digital Records

The Perfect 2016 World Team Table Tennis Championships was the most social & digital of all time, smashing all the records set in 2015.

#ITTFWorlds2016, which was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in the start of March reached over 48.5 million people across ITTF’s social & digital platform.

ITTF’s Promotion & Media Manager Matt POUND stated: “It is satisfying seeing that our carefully laid out strategies resulted in figures that exceeded all our expectations across all of our social & digital media platforms. This proves the incredible global appetite for international table tennis, and we will now think of new and innovate ways to engage our fans and increase these figures even more.”

ITTF’s Facebook page (Facebook.com/ITTFWorld) was the star performer, achieving 19,756,881 total reach, and close to 34 million impressions on the ITTF Facebook page, doubling the feat recorded in Suzhou.

Event posts on the ITTF twitter account (@ITTFWorld) left over 2 million twitter impressions, while on the ITTF’s Sina Weibo, the Chinese hybrid between Facebook and Twitter, relevant posts using the official hashtag alone, reached over 5.4 million people.

With 248 videos created for the 8 days of competition, viewers from 144 countries tuned in to followed the world’s biggest table tennis event on the ITTF Youtube channel (YouTube.com/ITTFChannel), resulting in 3 million views on the platform.

ITTF.com/itTV, ITTF’s free online streaming platform, which lived streamed eight tables from Kuala Lumpur, saw 735,500 unique visitors accessing the platform to watch the world’s best teams battle for the Championships title, live and on demand.

Over the 8 days of the Championships, 351.44 million hits were recorded on the ITTF.com, where 3,717,648 unique visitors accessed the ITTF page for results and updates about the World Championships.

Other than breakthroughs on the ITTF’s social media platforms, which now has 1.3 million fans, the 2016 World Championships also broke TV ratings in China and Japan on the last day, where the final showdown between Team China and Team Japan happened.

The 2016 World Championships once again proved that table tennis remains a massive sport in China, where a total of 190 million people in China alone tuned in to watch the event live on CCTV5. An average of 22 million people tuned into CCTV5 to watch the Men's Final between China & Japan, and 60 million people watched at least 1 minute of the match that China won to become the World Team Champions.

In Japan, rights holder TV Tokyo received a record 15% market share for TV viewers in Japan for the Women's Final, which is close to a record for the network for Sunday night viewing.

With the 500 accredited media working on site to spread news about the World Championships to the rest of the world, over 15,000 articles were written on the event, reaching millions of readers worldwide.

Breaking these media figures will be the target for next year’s World Table Tennis Championships to be held in Dusseldorf, Germany from 29 May to 5 June 2017.

#ITTFWorlds2016 Media Stats: