NBC Olympics’ Coverage Generates Record Social Chatter
The London 2012 Olympic Games generated record television viewership (219.4 million viewers), digital traffic (nearly two billion page views and 159.3 million video streams), and unprecedented social media chatter, making them the most social Games ever for NBC Olympics.
According to social media research company Bluefin Labs, NBC Olympics’ coverage of the Games were more social than the 2012 Super Bowl, the 2012 Grammys, 2012 Oscars, 2012 Golden Globes, and all seven games of the 2011 World Series combined.
NBC Olympics partnered with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Shazam to promote its coverage of the Games onto these popular social media platforms. It also populated Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, and GetGlue with Olympic content. These social media partnerships and efforts allowed NBC Olympics to communicate directly with fans of the Olympics and celebrate the Games with viewers in new and unique ways.
“Actively joining the social conversation through our partnerships with these platforms, as well as calling out Olympic social trends and highlights in our linear television coverage, aided us in reassembling the ever fragmenting media audience, most notably among that elusive younger demographic,” said Gary Zenkel, president, NBC Olympics. “Going into the Games, our social media goal was to be the life of the big Olympic viewing parties thrown by Facebook and Twitter over the 17 days of the Games…it appears we succeeded.”
Following are social media research highlights for the 2012 London Olympics as provided by NBCUniversal, Facebook, Twitter and Shazam as well as social media research companies Bluefin Labs, uSamp, Insight Express, and Social Q:
From Bluefin Labs
- Over the 17 days of the Games, there were nearly 83M social comments in total, 36M of which were driven by NBCU telecasts.
- Between the hours of 7pm and midnight, 99% of all social TV buzz was attributed to the primetime Olympics telecasts.
-
The 17 days of the Olympics drove 2.4M new people to join in the social TV conversation.
-
Highest Daily 24-7 Olympics buzz: Sunday August 12, 11.4M comments Opening Ceremony telecast, with 5M total comments.
-
In total, there were more than 82M comments on Twitter and public Facebook about the Olympics from July 27 through Aug 12.
Facebook/Twitter/Shazam:
According to Facebook, there are more than 101M fans on Olympics-related pages. During the Games, those pages increased by 12.2M fans.
- Facebook also saw over 100M Olympic-related posts or comments during the course of the Games.
- According to Twitter, there were more than 150M Olympic-related tweets.
- Less than 0.5% of those included #NBCFail
- According to Shazam, there were several million interactions with their app and the Shazam-enabled NBC Olympics broadcast.
