The social Olympics kicked off yesterday with a dazzling Opening Ceremony that attracted 5 million social media comments, according to analysis by Bluefin Labs. In fact, 94.2% of all social TV comments in primetime (7 p.m. to midnight ET) were about the Opening Ceremony. Perhaps amazingly, this did not set any records, but it did rank in the top five, according to Bluefin:
#1. 2012 Grammy Awards (CBS) : 13M social media comments
#2. 2012 BET Awards (BET) : 8.0M
#3. 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony (NBC) : 5.0M
#4. 2012 Academy Awards (ABC) : 3.8M
#5. 2011 MTV Video Music Awards (MTV) 3.1M
The social analytics company Trendrr ranked the event #2 of all-time, measuring the tweets across the full day of coverage (below). It recorded more than 7.6 million social interactions for the day, 59% of which came from mobile devices.
The top social moments of the ceremony included Team USA’s entrance, the appearance of James Bond with the Queen and the lighting of the cauldron with McCartney’s performance. Twitter said it saw its biggest spike when Mr. Bean appeared in a homage to the Olympians of “Chariots of Fire.” By the way, Rob Hawkes conducted a sentiment analysis of the ceremony (against worldwide tweets), and Mr. Bean didn’t fare very well.
NBC’s social media accounts were firing on all cylinders, and NBCNews.com and Today.com curated the big moments via Storify, like this tweet above from US water polo goalie Chay Lapin. Twitter.com’s #Olympics destination page, freshly launched (below), featured curated tweets and photos, as well. However, Twitter only made brief appearances in the broadcast itself.
Here’s the Bluefin Labs infographic, and we’ll update with more data as we get it…
(Full disclosure: I work for BreakingNews.com, which is part of NBC News Digital.)