Data shows that London Olympics made Twitter the king of social media

On August 5, 2012, according to foreign media reports, as more and more Olympic athletes and fans choose Twitter as a platform to communicate with each other about the Olympic Games, Twitter has undoubtedly become the most popular social platform for athletes to look forward to the games and for fans to cheer for the athletes during the Olympics.

The Olympics made Twitter the king of social media

The London Olympics was intense and full of surprises. While people were paying attention to who would win the medals, various controversies also impacted the public's attention. Due to the popularity of social networks, the public's participation in the Olympics has increased unprecedentedly, so watching and commenting on the Olympics has become a habitual thinking of people.

In fact, reporting the Olympics through social networks has become a consensus among British media. Many British media have sent special reporters to the competition sites to release relevant event information as soon as possible through social networks such as Twitter. At the same time, the public has used social media more widely. The rise of social media has allowed many people to participate in the Olympics more enthusiastically than anyone expected.

Many netizens chose to post their comments and dissatisfaction about the London Olympics on social networks such as Facebook and Google+. However, industry observers believe that although social platforms such as Facebook and Google+ seem to be lively, Twitter is the real king of social platforms during the Olympics. Some people even pointed out that some competitions attracted more attention because of the spread of Twitter.

"Twitter is a communication channel, so it's the best place for people to discuss these news events," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. "If you're just a member of a school sports team, you might just share it on Facebook. But the Olympics is a global event. When you watch the games, millions of other people around the world are watching too. So Twitter is the best place to share Olympic-related topics, not Facebook or Google+."

The numbers tell the story

On Twitter, users expressed their congratulations or regrets and disappointments for some athletes. As of Friday local time, the NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker tool captured a total of 383,174 swimming-related tweets and 335,881 gymnastics-related tweets.

When American swimmer Missy Franklin won the women's 100m backstroke title this week, she was tweeted 12,702 times a minute.

Some other Olympic sports generated even bigger buzz on Twitter. When the U.S. women's gymnastics team won gold, the number of new tweets on Twitter reached 29,000 per minute, and when American swimming star Michael Phelps set an Olympic record for medals, the number of new tweets on Twitter reached 37,000 per minute.

In addition, some players also chose to look forward to or review their games on Twitter, and Tyler Clary of the US team was one of them. After winning a gold medal on Wednesday afternoon, Clary said on Twitter: "I am now completely in the state, feeling very relaxed, and I can't wait to fly to the sky."

Clary has 18,568 followers on Twitter, far behind Phelps, who has 912,756 followers.

It is worth mentioning that Phelps also used Twitter to interact with US President Obama. After Phelps won a record number of gold medals, Obama congratulated him and said that the whole country was proud of him. Phelps also replied to Obama, saying, "Thank you, Mr. President. I am also very proud to be able to set a new Olympic individual medal record for the United States.

Negative factors

However, Twitter has not been all praise on the Internet. On July 28, Twitter experienced a downtime, after which Twitter updated its blog to apologize and explain that the downtime was caused by problems with two data centers at the same time.

Then, Guy Adams, a Los Angeles correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, was banned from Twitter after he published the email address of Gary Zenkel, president of NBC's Olympic coverage, on Twitter.