150 Million Olympic Tweets, but who won Gold?

It was a question asked on Radio 4 today and it’s worthy of closer examination. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising has estimated there were 150 million Olympic related tweets sent during the Games. That’s 150 million tweets across 16 days, a pretty staggering figure. But we already knew that London 2012 had captured the public’s imagination. The real question is how have businesses used Twitter to cash in on this activity?

Brands have recognised that getting people to talk about them is the real boon of social media. The more people talk about a brand, the more familiar they are with it, the more popular it becomes and the more likely people are to invest in it. It sounds a hopelessly simplistic description of human behaviour, but by and large it rings true. Familiarity breeds favourability, not contempt.

In the main, companies have learnt to reject the corporate ‘hard-sell’ from a generic company Twitter account. Instead, businesses focused on individual athletes and competitors.  A company like Adidas has done particularly well by sponsoring high-profile athletes, both through traditional mediums such as billboards as well as via social media like Twitter. In fact some estimates suggest the number of people following Adidas on Twitter has increased ten-fold during the Games.

Another question this has raised is whether Twitter and social media is effectively making traditional forms of advertising and marketing redundant. The simple answer is, no. In many cases social media is being used to accentuate the effects of TV advertising. If anything, social media is working best in partnership with traditional methods of engagement.

So another win for Twitter and the social media revolution, right? Yes and no. Twitter’s effectiveness in generating debate on brands is almost unparalleled. But understanding how this can be effectively translated into increasing sales, for example, is a much trickier process, and one a number of brands are grappling with.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learnt from this is that we should not forget the ‘social’ aspect of social media. It is still about conversations between people, not organisations. For brands to use Twitter effectively, they mustn’t lose sight of this. 

John Hood

Consultant

john@linstockcommunications.com