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Facebook Sees 116 Million Olympic-Themed Communications

The Olympics are over, and we can say, without a doubt, that this year was the first true “social media games.” And unprecedented amount of people took to social networks to not only discu...
Facebook Sees 116 Million Olympic-Themed Communications
Written by Josh Wolford
  • The Olympics are over, and we can say, without a doubt, that this year was the first true “social media games.” And unprecedented amount of people took to social networks to not only discuss the action, but to follow athletes and get up-to-the-minute results that they weren’t able to find through traditional TV broadcasts.

    Today, Facebook has released their stats for the 2012 Summer games, and they are reporting over 116 million Olympic-themed communications. That includes posts and comments on said posts.

    Not only that, but Olympic athletes saw their Facebook pages expand to the tune of 12.2 million “likes” throughout the games.

    Here are some specific stats, from Facebook:

    • More than 1M people liked Jamaican Usain Bolt’s Page during the games, bringing his total to more than 8.1M.
    • More than 850K people liked Michael Phelps’ Page during the games, bringing his total to more than 6.3M.
    • Jessica Ennis saw an increase of 632%, bringing her to a total of 801K people connected to her Page – starting from just 108.7K.
    • Tom Daley saw an increase of 672%, bringing him to a total of 1M – starting from just 120K.
    • Jordyn Wieber started out with 33K people who had liked her Page – and won over the hearts of more than 288K more, bringing her to a total of 324K (+818%)
    • Marcel Nguyen won more than silver for Germany – he added 193K new people to his Page’s starting base of 7.5K – for a new total of more than 200K (+2524%)
    • Gabby Douglas wins the “Rising Star” award – adding more than 591K people to her starting base of a slightly over 14K on her Page – she’s now at more than 600K (+4045%)

    And when Michael Phelps won his final medal to become the best Olympican ever, mentions of his name went through the roof – a 1200% spike.

    Earlier this week, Twitter told us that they saw more than 150 million tweets about the Olympics from open to close. Considering that Twitter has around half the user base as Facebook, I guess that means that Twitter was the preferred place for Olympic-themed communications in 2012.

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