London Olympics Opening Ceremony Resulted In 9.7 Million Tweets

Sites include Twitter.com . Published on August 21st, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Blame it on the great Chinese firewall, but the opening ceremony and the first day of the London Olympics shattered the tweets record set by the entire 2008 Beijing Olympic games.

According to official numbers from Twitter, the opening ceremony in London was tweeted a whopping 9.66 million times. The first day of the actual games surpassed tweets for all of the games held in China years ago.

No doubt the spectacular nature of the London opening ceremony played a part, but the huge number of tweets is largely owed to Twitter’s maturity. In 2008 Twitter had nowhere near the number of users it has now or the level of engagement.

The micro blogging platform now has over 500 million active users with more than a third of those residing in the US. Twitters other dominant areas include Canada and the UK so it’s not surprising at all that these people combined racked up the level of tweets these games have seen.

The London will no doubt set the record for the most tweets at a set of games ever, because the games there are being staged at the point when Twitter is at its strongest. In another 4 years and depending where Twitter’s growth is in the English-speaking nations and the rest of the world, we’ll no doubt be looking at a fresh set of record-breaking numbers.

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