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

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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.