• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 12, 2018

The FIFA World Cup final on Sunday between Croatia and France will be cheered on by Nike and a whole bunch of fans. For the first time, the American sportswear manufacturing company will supply the “kit,” which highlights the true colors, separately, for each of the two finalists.

Marketers also will show their true colors by connecting with influencers talking about the game and the brands.

The social search engine Klear, which developed an index of influencers to support companies like L’Oréal, identifies a variety of celebrities and people with followers. It ranks these influencers and tracks their activities -- for example, each time they mention a brand or person or event. Brands can search the site’s database to identify, track and build influencer marketing programs.  

For example, marketers enter the hashtag and monikers tracking the keywords around the World Cup in any language to find influencers talking about the event and sports, Klear COO Guy Avigdor said.

The engine also lets advertisers search by a “skill” such as blogger. The data is parsed by geography and hashtags shared, among others.

Based on a search for World Cup influencers, Neymar Jr. surfaced as one of the highest with 201.6 million fans on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Neymar is a Brazilian professional footballer who is a forward for French club Paris Saint-Germain and the Brazil national team, according to Wikipedia.

The data is pulled from Facebook, Twitter. Instagram, YouTube and Blogs.

The Klear database stores more than 900 million profiles and shows the influencer levels across the different networks. It can also identify when one channel sees a higher number of posts compared with others on a specific subject. In January, for example, the analytics and social media company reported that posts on Instagram nearly doubled to more than 1.5 million worldwide between 2016 and 2017.