Our man in Madrid (at least this weekend for the finals) has compiled the final installment of SMI’s analysis of World Cup 2010 sponsors. Each week of the tournament we look at which of the sponsors are up and which are down from a social media perspective. And the big winner is….

Spain is the newly crowned champion of world football. But which of the 14 World Cup 2010 sponsors gained the biggest social following as part of the massive exposure (and expenditure)? As the final SMI World Cup sponsor social media audit comes to a close, we are happy to announce that the 2010 World Cup sponsor winner is…

There are three awards, actually.

MVP: Coca-Cola

There  is no doubt that Coca-Cola has made an impressive mark online with its determined advertising and interactive social contest on YouTube, The Longest Celebration. Through a centralized social media presence, it has experienced considerable fan growth: 1.4 million fans during the month-long tournament, as can be seen in the graph bellow, which shows Facebook growth over the past few months. Notice how much steeper the Facebook fan growth is during the last month of World Cup play.

When looking at absolute size, Coca-Cola is the jugernaught too of World Cup sponsors with now more than 7 million followers, a gain of greater than 20 per cent in just one month! Coke also had the most positively steady growth over the entire period.

Most Improved: Adidas

Adidas was a close second to Coke throughout the tournament in terms of absolute gains. Most of its publicity came from its viral TV commercial and the controversial Jabulani ball. But the reason Adidas gets the Most Improved award is because it was able to make the map with its Adidas Football shoe, a brand it hopes can attain Adidas Running and Adidas Original success. In fact, in our initial social number count for Adidas at the beginning of the tournament we didn’t even consider the Adidas Football Facebook page because its fan presence was negligible compared to the Adidas Originals page, which had about 3 million fans. However, after a late start, it grew about 500,000 fans since the middle of the tournament and it now stands at 1.3 million fans. We can now see this online brand presence as an integral part of the overall Adidas online image. And this final week, Adidas was the big winner with a whopping 1.4 million-follower gain across all channels.

This impressive buildup of the Adidas Football brand image online has also put Adidas ahead of Coca-Cola in terms of overall fan growth for the duration of the tournament, which can be seen in the chart bellow depicting overall growth of the biggest social follower gainers.

Biggest Upset: Budweiser

A few weeks ago we reported (with some astonishment) that Budweiser was racking up impressive gains online through its Bud United reality show hosted on Facebook and via YouTube; it worked much like a Real World for the World Cup. Unfortunately, after that massive build-up of popularity and followers in the first few weeks of the tournament, interest in the show began to dwindle online as fewer and fewer fans signed up (this is illustrated in the second line graph above).

The final number for Budweiser floated around 950,000 followers as the World Cup winded down. Moreover, the Bud United Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages are independent of the primary Budweiser social network channel accounts, which, it appears, will provide little gains in the long-run for Budweiser as fans slowly realize the show is over and they retract their fan membership.

Here is the final leader board for the World Cup sponsors:

As the chart shows, there were plenty of duds too. Sony, Visa, Continental Tires are among the big brands that did little to exploit their World Cup investment with any meaningful social media brand loyalty building.