The biggest moments of the Olympics according to Twitter

By Natan Edelsburg 

The Olympics has ended, and Twitter is sharing the biggest moments that occurred across their platform. If you remember, Twitter struck a deal with NBC to curate content for the event. Additionally, visualizing and curating tweets throughout the games has been a major part of the second screen Olympics. Now the platform has released some of the biggest moments from the Games that occurred in 140-characters or less.

The blog post, published yesterday by Andrew Fitzgerald Twitter’s Manager of Editorial Programming, states that they “saw more than 150 million Tweets about the Olympics over the past 16 days.” The biggest moments during actual competition ended up being “Kobe Bryant’s dunk towards the end of the USA-Spain basketball game, and Hope Solo’s (@HopeSolo) land-diving save in the women’s USA-Japan soccer match.” With Bryant’s worldwide fame, it’s not a surprise his big play in the game resonated so strongly.

Calculated in Tweets per minute, here are the biggest moments overall:

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-Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt) of Jamaica wins gold in the 200m sprint: 80,000+ TPM
-Bolt wins gold in the 100m sprint: 74,000+ TPM
-Andy Murray (@andy_murray) of Great Britain wins gold in the men’s tennis singles: 57,000+ TPM
-Jamaica wins gold and sets the world record in the men’s 4×100 relay: 52,000+ TPM
-Team USA beats Spain to win gold in men’s basketball: 41,000+ TPM

However, last night’s Closing Ceremonies may have set the high water mark for the Games. Twitter’s TV department highlighted the Spice Girls performance, which inspired more than 116,000 TPM.

Finally, here are the most discussed athletes from the games, according to Twitter:

1.Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt)
2. Michael Phelps (@MichaelPhelps)
3. Tom Daley (@TomDaley1994)
4. Ryan Lochte (@ryanlochte)
5. Gabby Douglas (@gabrielledoug)
6. Andy Murray (@andy_murray)
7. Kobe Bryant (#GetKobeOnTwitter)
8. Yohan Blake (@YohanBlake)
9. Lee Chong Wei (@Lee_C_Wei)
10. LeBron James (@KingJames)

We’ll have more post-Olympics social analysis coming soon…

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