For the first time Twitter has created a dedicated website looking back at some of the most talked about moments of the last year in the UK and around the world in a year that saw London host an Olympic Games that beat all expectations, and create some inspiring memories for all. It was also a year that saw a Tweet from Mars, Barack Obama win four more years and David Cameron, Nadine Dorries, Gary Lineker and Girls Aloud among many others finally join the 140 character conversation. Read More »

For copywriters, the scene will be familiar. A brief lands on your desk and all of the pertinent details are there – the message, the audience, the tone – everything you need to start tapping away at your keyboard.

Now it’s down to you. You have to decide the best way to transform the information in that brief into an engaging, meaningful piece of content that works.

However, your client or whoever it was that provided this brief will often be expecting one thing and one thing only – a Word document full of information, keywords and reinforced sales messages in text form. Read More »

Twitter has released some data that provides interesting statistics that give an idea of the kind of performance Promoted Tweets are achieving for advertisers.

Most notably though is how mobile is performing. In one campaign for Volkswagen the best performing Promoted Tweet on mobile received 43.8% engagement.

While a campaign for LG saw a Promoted trend achieve an average engagement rate of 38%. Read More »

Despite continuous rumblings of discontent around certain brands reportedly taking over the Games this summer, most people have hopefully realised by now that without the sponsors having invested hundreds of millions of pounds to make the events a success, the Olympics and Paralympics could not have taken place.

Lord Coe, the chairman of LOCOG, has argued that the public needs to be better educated about the importance of sponsorship, while many brands have called for innovation between rights holders and sponsors.

If you put the debate aside for a minute and look at the reality, the Games would have been a huge disappointment without the investment the sponsors have put in. Read More »

Throughout the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games, there has been plenty of attention on how the events have fuelled social media activity.

On Facebook, despite big differences in strategies, most of the sponsors and partners have dedicated the majority of their posts to content relating to the games. Read More »

London 2012 has been widely described as ‘the first social media Games’ and the way in which Team GB athletes used Twitter to connect directly with their fans and increase their marketability was almost as interesting as the battles for Gold, Silver and Bronze medals.

To better understand this phenomenon, at Inferno we decided to collaborate with Leaderboarded.com on a study of the Twitter activity of all 337 Team GB athletes who used the site during the duration of the Olympic Games and ranking British Olympians on Twitter ‘popularity’, ‘largest percentage growth’ and ‘talkativeness’ threw up some fun and interesting stats. Read More »

Among the official Olympics sponsors Samsung has been named as the brand that did best out of the London 2012 games in terms of online visits, followed by Adidas, according to data from Hitwise.

Among the broadcasters there was no competition. The BBC trounced Sky News in that battle.

There was good news for non-sponsors too. While Adidas did well in terms of a receiving a good uplift in terms of online visits data from Socialbakers points to rival Nike, which was not an official sponsor, winning the battle for sporting social media engagement on Facebook and Twitter.  Read More »

A good infographic here from Fiasco Design summing up how Twitter was used throughout the London Olympics, which certainly lived up to their promise as the world’s first social games.

It illustrates how Twitter  played such a major role in the London 2012 Olympics from the 10 million who mentioned the opening ceremony, the popularity of Mr Bean and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the rise of #NBCfail and the millions of mentions of our brilliant Team GB and the athletes.

It is all here. The highs as well as some of the lows such as Tom Daley’s Twitter troll moment. Although that didn’t hold Daley back he was the big winner on Twitter at London 2012. Read More »

Week two of the London 2012 Olympic Games has seen Team GB surge up to third in the medals table – but it’s not the only measure of their success by any stretch. In the second week, the athletes have continued to see their social media profiles soar in line with their successes – with big names such as Chris Hoy and Jessica Ennis experiencing huge growth in their profiles, whilst relative unknowns such as Robbie Grabarz also saw their online profiles boom.

Golden girl Jessica Ennis has seen the biggest success of any Team GB athletes so far, with a huge 3757% increase in Facebook likes over her weekend competition – securing almost 500,000 fans in total. Team mate and training partner Katarina Johnson-Thompson also experienced a huge uplift in fans online, with an impressive 1223% increase. Read More »

The total number of tweets for the men’s 200m final totalled 780,000 yesterday as Usain Bolt, illustrated wonderfully by The Times today, made Olympic athletics history as the first man to retain both 100 and 200m sprint titles.

However, it is the men’s 100m final from Sunday night that has caused the greatest reaction on Twitter so far with a staggering 2.4 million Tweets, analysis using SMG’s ECHOscreen tool on day 13 of London 2012 shows. Read More »