Now that the London 2012 summer games have come to a close, Twitter is releasing some figures that shine a light on just how gigantic a role social media played in this year’s Olympics. 2012 is no doubt the first ever Twitter-fueled Olympics, as the amount of engagement on the site dwarfed anything seen in the 2008 Games in Beijing. More tweets concerning the Olympics were coming in on single days before the opening ceremony than came in during the entire 2088 Games.
Twitter did their part to get people excited about the Olympics by launching their own dedicated event page.
And now, Twitter is saying that the Olympics generated more than 150 million tweets from start to finish (a 16-day period).
Among those 150 million+ tweets, it was Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt who ran away with the show (apologies). Bolt was responsible for the two biggest tweet-spiking events during competition. He garnered 80,000+ tweets per minutes when he won the 200m dash and 74,000+ TPM when he beat the field in the 100m dash.
The rest of the top five TPM moments belonged to Andy Murray (men’s tennis gold medalist), the Jamaican relay team (4×100 gold medalists), and Team USA (basketball, after beating Spain for the gold) – in that order.
Twitter also reports that ten different athletes generated more than 1 million tweets each. The aforementioned Usain Bolt leads the pack, followed by Michael Phelps, Tom Daley, Ryan Lochte, Gabby Douglas, Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei, and LeBron James.
Of all the sports, it was soccer that reigned supreme with over 5 million tweets.
But in all, it wasn’t an Olympic athlete (or even a sport) that drew the most TPM. That title belongs to the Spice Girls, whose closing ceremony performance brought in a whopping 116,000 TPM.