The 2012 London Olympic Games have come to a close and now it's time for some analysis. Let's start with Twitter. We saw more than 150 million Tweets about the Olympics over the past 16 days. Many thanks for the data from the Twitter Blog Post by Andrew Fitzgerald, Manager, Editorial Programming (@magicandrew)
The biggest moments of competition, as measured by Tweets per minute (TPM), were:
-Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt) of Jamaica wins gold in the 200m sprint: 80,000+ TPM
-Bolt wins gold in the 100m sprint: 74,000+ TPM
-Andy Murray (@andy_murray) of Great Britain wins gold in the men’s tennis singles: 57,000+ TPM
-Jamaica wins gold and sets the world record in the men’s 4×100 relay: 52,000+ TPM
-Team USA beats Spain to win gold in men’s basketball: 41,000+ TPM
The biggest tweeting moments that came during the heat of competition included Kobe Bryant’s dunk toward the end of the USA-Spain basketball game, and Hope Solo’s (@HopeSolo) heroic save in the women’s USA-Japan soccer match.
In addition to inspiring the biggest conversation spike with his 200m win, Usain Bolt also took home the record for being the most discussed athlete of the Games. But he had company — nine other Olympians garnered more than 1 million Tweets each:
1.Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt)
2. Michael Phelps (@MichaelPhelps)
3. Tom Daley (@TomDaley1994)
4. Ryan Lochte (@ryanlochte)
5. Gabby Douglas (@gabrielledoug)
6. Andy Murray (@andy_murray)
7. Kobe Bryant (#GetKobeOnTwitter)
8. Yohan Blake (@YohanBlake)
9. Lee Chong Wei (@Lee_C_Wei)
10. LeBron James (@KingJames)
Based on the number of Tweets, soccer was the most popular sport of these Olympic games garnering over 5 million Tweets. Other popular sports were swimming, gymnastics and volleyball. And we were also treated to a number of different perspectives on the athletic accomplishments we saw.
As expected both the opening and closing night ceremonies resulted in large numbers of Tweets. Last night's closing ceremonies included performances by The Who, George Michael Eric Idle, Russell Brand and more. But it was the Spice Girls who received the most tweets per minute at 116,000.
With all this excitement at the world's first Social Media Olympics, I can hardly wait to see what happens in Rio!
