Was this really the "Social" Olympics?

Now that the games are done for another four years, it’s time to look back at what happened over the last two weeks. Not on the field but off it. Many were heralding this as the social media Olympics and certainly that seems to have been the case.

If you look at the stats the Games have been a huge success. Not only were spectators and athletes talking and taking photos all over the place, they were sharing their experiences, on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+ and everywhere else.

Instagram saw a particular spike with over 650,000 photos tagged “#olympics” and 27,000 tagged “#michaelphelps” alone. I myself got in on the Olympic Instagram action – you can have a look over here, follow me on Instagram to see a few more.

Twitter as well has proved extremely popular with top athletes like Usain Bolt reaching millions of followers with their tweets. All this social activity led to a huge increase in viewing figures, with over 4.9 billion tuning in.

For more info on how the Olympics went social in 2012, have a look at the infographic below from the good folks at SEO.com