Commercial Agents: Instagram and the Olympics

Instagram, the hugely popular Mobile App and social network seems to have been one of the winning social media platforms of the London 2012 Olympics. During the 2 weeks of the games, users shared over 100,000 photos of the Olympics.

Launched in the autumn of 2010, the free photo-sharing App allows the user to take photos, apply filters and then share with other Instagram users or on other social networking sites. The network currently has 80 million users.

Over the last two weeks Instagram has allowed spectators, organisers, games makers and competitors alike to share their images of the London games. As with the social engagement that we discussed in the past that other platforms have given us, Instagram has provided an exciting insight, ‘behind-the-scenes’. We have had an unprecedented level of access to the competitors and the games.

Even traditional Journalists covering the events have been using Instagram to share their own personal perspective of London 2012. US TV personality Ryan Seacrest (don’t worry, I’d never heard of him.) for example posted just two photos which were then shared with 1.47million people on Instagram alone.

The medals for the most popular#hashtags on Intsagram have been:

Gold – #Olympics – 650,000

Silver – #London2012 – 263,000

Bronze – #michaelphelps – 27,000

And the results for the top three Olympic venues for sharing photos from:

Gold – Olympic Stadium with 7600 plus photos

Silver – Wembley Stadium with 3500 plus photos

Bronze – Basketball Arena with 2300 plus photos

These results are probably not a surprise due to the capacity of the venues and the sheer amount of activity at each. Taking this into consideration, perhaps the biggest surprise is the number of photos taken, as one would have probably expected more?

Philip Burrows Marketing Consultant