Nike managed to outperform official Olympic sponsor Adidas on social media during the Games, generating more tweets and pulling in more new Facebook fans.
However Adidas had the last laugh, as it achieved a much bigger spike in traffic during the two weeks.
Non-sponsor Nike was particularly visible around London during the Olympics with a campaign that celebrated everyday athletes. It bought up hundreds of billboards around the city and on the tube featuring the hashtag ‘#findgreatness’.
Adidas, which spent tens of millions of pounds to be an official sponsor, ran a campaign featuring Team GB athletes and the hashtag ‘#takethestage’.
According to Socialbakers’ CheerMeter there were more than 16,000 tweets associating Nike with the word Olympic between 27 July and 2 August compared to 9,295 for Adidas.
Furthermore. Nike attracted 166,718 new Facebook fans during the Games versus 80,761 for Adidas.
Data from Experian Hitwise shows that Nike achieved a 6% growth in its number of Facebook fans and a 77% boost in engagement on its Facebook page compared to 2% and 59% respectively for Adidas.
But in terms of website visits, Adidas scored a 44% uplift in traffic compared to 10% for Nike. Of the other official sponsors, Samsung was the biggest winner with a 111% boost in traffic while Cadbury’s saw its visit increase by 41%.
In comparison, McDonalds saw just a 1% uplift in traffic, however non-sponsor Burger King actually saw a 33% decline.
Reader comments (4)
9:40AM on 16th August 2012
Have you not mentioned Mars' huge spike in Twitter mentions as it isn't the chocolate bar company but a planet. Surely you have to at least mention that landing Curiosity on the red planet is nearly more interesting than the entire Olympic sponsors put together. Does this invalidate the Apple score because a lot of people tweet about eating an apple?
Founding partner at ralphs mcintosh + partners
5:46PM on 17th August 2012
This tells us little.
If I worked at Nike or Adidas I'd want to know:
What's behind the difference in numbers of Tweets? Was it purely because Nike had a more engaging campaign that people where happier to share?
A better measure of this is comparing the hashtags.
According to Visual.ly in the month running up to 16 August Adidas's #takethestage was mentioned 51,972 times, Nike's #findgreatness 79,490 times.
However, these are still fairly low numbers given the millions that will have been spent on global media.
In comparison #london2012 received 5,784,944 mentions and #bolt 272,779.
If I was responsible for either brand's social media efforts I'd be disappointed.
Hey, but at least they received millions of views on YouTube. Because that's a social channel, right?!
Founding partner at ralphs mcintosh + partners
6:33PM on 17th August 2012
Plus!
Facebook 'Likes' is not a measure of social buzz, It doesn't tell you anything about advocacy or conversation and is more likely to be the direct result of the $ that were spent on Facebook advertising.
11:56AM on 7th November 2012
Is true that Nike make very good products but from that graph appears that Nike had almoust twice as Adidas which is hard to belive.
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