Finding interesting data and statistics is always a challenge when writing content. You have to search through hundreds of websites and pages to find just a few useful bit of information. Google offer some advance search features to help filter search results, but you still have to work your way through the pages to collate just a few bits of content gems for use in an article or infographic.

However, I did come across an interesting site and thought I would share it in the hope it might help a few people out there looking for some interesting data for their content.

Yougov is an international, full service online market research agency. They claim a 350,00 member strong database of volunteers who offer opinions on a variety of subjects from social media to politics. These results are searchable and they position it as a “giant review website”.

They collate a lot of the results and publish them under Public Opinion. I decided to run a quick search for social media related to Brazil or the World Cup 2014. It’s an interesting search as we can look back in hindsight at the opinions of those taking part in the surveys and see how their thought panned out. I found it easier to search the YouGove website using Google search and use their advance search command for searching a specific site like this-

Site:www.yougov.co.uk/ “world cup” twitter

Here is what I found in the first few pages of results.

A survey on Wednesday, June 18, reports that Children are more optimistic than adults about England’s World Cup prospects with 45% of 8-10 year olds believing they will win.

Although young children might not make great football pundits or be more accurate than an octopus, the British public did come close to foreseeing the final scores of the world cup final between Germany and Argentina and side the day before the match predicted a 2-1 win for the German.

A poll conducted for the Sunday Times revealed that British fans didn’t really want Germany or Argentina to win the World Cup at all, but in the end 38% rooted for Germany to triumph.

For my last fascinating statistic I had to go off the YouGov site and into Google for a quick search on Twitter and the World Cup. The Guardian came out top of the results with a news story on Twitter and Facebook breaking new records during the World Cup.

Facebook said that 88 million global users made a record 280m interactions – posts, likes and comments – during the World Cup final, easily breaking the previous record held by the Super Bowl in 2013 that only managed a paltry 245 million interaction.

So, YouGov has some nice opinions that you can cite, but any articles or content you write might need to be augmented with data from other sources.