The first Twitter Olympics: By the numbers

The London Games were the first to take place since Twitter exploded, and boy, do tweeters love Usain Bolt and The Spice Girls

Usain Bolt
(Image credit: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

The London Games came to an end Sunday night with musical performances from British acts such as The Spice Girls, Jessie J, The Who, and One Direction. And though the closing ceremonies were much debated, one thing's for sure: People were stoked about The Spice Girls, tweeting about Posh, Baby, Ginger, Sporty, and Scary 116,000 times a minute, the record for the evening's most tweeted performance. The London Games, the first to occur since the active number of Twitter users exploded in the past few years, have been touted as the "First Twitter Olympics." (With more than 60 percent of Twitter users residing outside the U.S., the Rio Olympics in 2016 are expected to be even bigger on the social media platform.) Here, a statistical look at just how popular that Olympics hashtag was:

150 million

Tweets posted about the Olympics

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140 million

Approximate number of active Twitter users

9.66 million

Mentions of the Olympics opening ceremony on Twitter in a single day

80,000

Tweets per minute about Usain Bolt's 200-meter gold win, the record for tweets per minute during Olympic competition

116,000

Tweets per minute (or roughly 2,000 per second) about the Spice Girls performance during the closing ceremonies, the record for that evening

25,088

Record for tweets per second, for posts about a December 2011 TV screening in Japan of animated feature film Castle in the Sky

13,684

The reigning sports record for tweets per second, which was made during the Champions League match between Barcelona and Chelsea in April

74,000

Tweets per minute about Bolt's 100-meter gold win

57,000

Tweets per minute about Andy Murray's gold medal win against Roger Federer in the men's tennis singles. Murray was the first British man to win the gold in singles since 1908.

10

Olympians who garnered more than 1 million tweets (from first to tenth place, they are: Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Tom Daley, Ryan Lochte, Gabby Douglas, Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei, Lebron James)

5

Number of those athletes who are from the U.S.

60

Approximate percentage of Twitter users who live outside the U.S.

33.3 million

Number of Twitter accounts in Brazil, which will host the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Behind the U.S., Brazil is the second most active country on Twitter.

Sources: Associated Press, AllTwitter, CNET, The Hollywood Reporter, Mashable, Semiocast, Twitter (2)

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Frances is a senior editor at TheWeek.com, managing the website on the early morning shift and editing stories on everything from politics to entertainment to science and tech. She's a graduate of Yale and the University of Missouri journalism school, and has previously worked at TIME and Real Simple. You can follow her on Twitter and on Tumblr.