The 2024 Paris Olympic Games is now over, and X has reported that the event drove new record highs in usage over the last two weeks.
Which is hard to fully believe, given that X is always claiming new record highs, and those claims aren’t always accurate. But based on X’s tracking and insight, here are X’s data insights for Olympic engagement.
So X says that there were more than 238 million posts related to the Olympics, which drove a cumulative 103 billion impressions in the app. Which is a significant multiple, but then again, that only means that each post about the Games was seen by 433 people in the app, on average.
Which is not some crazy number, though there is also a question as to how much X users actually engaged with these posts, based on them appearing in their timelines.
Because impressions only means that they were shown, not that people interacted with them, or even read them in-stream.
For additional context, the 2016 Olympics inspired 187 million tweets and generated 75 billion total impressions. The COVID disrupted 2020 Games saw less engagement overall, so it’s not a great comparative measure, but the 2012 event drove 150 million related posts.
Based on these insights, the 2024 Games was pretty much exactly in line with growing engagement trends over time, though that, in itself, is still relevant, considering the broader narrative that X has been losing momentum of late.
Indeed, amid reports that more X users are abandoning the app, and switching to Threads instead, TechCrunch recently reported that no such mass exodus is reflected in third-party analytics.
Despite Elon Musk’s divisive commentary, on pretty much every hot-button political topic, it seems that X is still seeing plenty of action, especially around live events.
In terms of specific sports, Gymnastics drove the most discussion on X.
I actually would have assumed that basketball would have been the top, due to the popularity of the NBA in the app, or maybe breakdancing, after the flip-flopping performance of Australia’s “Raygun”.
But Simone Biles record-setting run continues to attract attention, as it should, given that we’re witnessing history in the making almost every time she takes the floor.
In terms of specific teams, Brazil, the U.S. and Japan saw a heap of X mentions.
Which makes sense, as X is popular in each of these regions.
Overall, it’s not an amazing win for X, as such, there wasn’t some huge surge, based on historic engagement trends. But it was seemingly a steady increase in engagement for the app, which again, is relevant within itself, given the many reports that X is losing ground in the social media race.
X hasn’t grown its daily active user count in almost two years, but those who are using the app remain highly active. Which underlines, once again, the challenge that Meta will have in taking on X with Threads, in that many X communities, particularly those related to sports and real-time events, are well-established and well-embedded within the app.
