Analysing social media trends during the Olympics and other major sporting events has become the norm these days. Some data is on the money, while other research seems skewed.
Hootsuite, the social media management platform, has conducted research into the most talked-about Olympic sports amongst women and men in the UK and revealed “surprising discoveries”.
Analysing data from Twitter in the UK across the Olympic period, Hootsuite found a total of 475,592 mentions about various sports at this year’s Games in Tokyo.
The data showed a “significant gender divide” when it comes to the Olympic sportsmen and women tweet about.
For men, they were hockey (76% of mentions about the sport), shooting and weightlifting (both 73%). For women, the most tweeted about sports were Gymnastics (52%), Diving (51%) and Equestrian sports (50%)
Traditional sports were the most talked about on social media: Gymnastics (83,104 mentions), swimming (76,625) and tennis (65,199) were the top three mentioned Olympic sports overall.
Men showed more interest than women in Olympic sports on social media across the board, with only two exceptions: gymnastics and diving.
Meanwhile, content marketing outfit ABCD Agency and Rascasse partnered up during the Toko Games to create a map of the most popular Olympic sports around the world.
Infographic: Hover over countries for sport popularity
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/txYUe/
Rascasse was able to map interests in more than 275,000 topics by analysing likes on social media.
Using the consumer insights tool that measures interests expressed online using artificial intelligence, it was able to determine which are the most popular sports in 154 countries, from volleyball in Mongolia to baseball in the Philippines.
There are some fairly bizarre results, including Mexico, which cited field hockey as its third most popular sport!
Last month, another set of data revealed that hockey sat down on a list of most popular Olympic sports in the UK, although not everyone agreed with the results.
