SOCHI, RUSSIA and LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND— Between Olympic athletes and fans, the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games generated around 2 billion social media impressions across all Olympic platforms.
The International Olympic Committee tracked social media activity on the Olympic Athletes’ Hub, the IOC’s social media platform that combines feeds from more than 6,000 Olympians across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The metrics included mentions, likes, shares, photos and interactions across these platforms and VKontakte, the most popular social network in the world for Russian speakers.
More than 2 million new fans joined the Olympic Facebook page during the Olympic Games, the Olympic Twitter account amassed 168,101 new followers, the Olympic Instagram account gained more than 150,000 new followers, and VK saw over 650,000 new fans join the Olympic page, with a total of 3 million visitors in total during February 2014.
By the numbers, the Olympic Athletes’ Hub saw:
· 90,000 total updates by Sochi 2014 Olympians and teams
· The United States as the most active team participating in social media activity, logging 22,598 posts across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram during the Games. Canada and Great Britain followed with 15,716 and 9,867 posts respectively
· The most commonly used hashtag during the Olympics was #sochi2014, with almost 11,000 uses in the Hub’s feed. Rounding out the top five were #wearewinter, #teamusa, #olympics, #goaus and #wirfuerD
· The most @mentions across all social feeds were @cdnolympicteam, with over 2,000, followed by @teamgb, @sochi2014, @usolympicn and @pechalatbourzat
· The busiest days were Feb. 7, the day of the Opening Ceremony, and Feb. 8, when the figure skating team competition and women’s free style skiing moguls took place.
The host country also got behind its home Olympic Games through social media. The Olympic page on VK was established a year ago. Today it is the most popular official community on the platform, with over 2.8 million fans. More than 54 million Olympic mentions were made during the Sochi Games on VK, an average of 1.5 million mentions a day. Ten million of those mentions occurred during the Opening Ceremony, and 25 million during the Closing Ceremony.
Top Russian athletes – including Adelina Sotnikova, Yulia Lipnitskaya and Evgeni Plushenko – gained over 400,000 new followers during the Olympic Games.
Gold medallist and figure skating sensation Lipnitskaya became the No. 1 Olympic celebrity on VK with over 700,000 likes posted on her wall, and over 2 million likes of her photos in a single photo album.
