The International Olympic Committee already was off to bad start after issuing four pages of restrictive social media, blogging and online guidelines to athletes and commercial sponsors for the 2016 Rio Games — including a ban on posting about the games as they happen, commenting on the activities of other participants and even limiting their use of the word “Olympics.”
Then — four years after the social media bonanza that was the 2012 London Olympics — the marketing blog Fluent revealed that just 33 percent of people paying attention to the Olympics are following the games on social media, compared with the 46 percent who originally said they planned to follow along on Facebook and other platforms.
Even more surprising, considering how Twitter has become a go-to platform for breaking new around the world, only 3 percent of people following the Olympics on social media say that Twitter is their top choice.
The results are based on surveys of 2,970 U.S. adults at the end of July, and 3,081 in early August.
“Even though the Olympics should theoretically be the perfect event for Twitter to capitalize on, the fact of the matter is they just haven’t been able to break through in a big way,” Fluent’s chief marketing officer Jordan Cohen told MediaPost.
By way of comparison, on Aug. 9, 2012, Twitter sent this tweet:
“Record alert! @usainbolt sets a new Olympic Games conversation record with over 80,000 TPM [tweets per minute] for his 200m victory. #Olympics.
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