The Olympics offers three levels of sponsorship to brands- worldwide, London-based and athlete-based. Social media app Wildfire (recently acquired by Google) has tracked the main sponsors’ activity on social media over the duration of the Olympics and looked at whether they have seen an uptake similar to that of the athletes.
Wildfire examined the Premium Sponsors (Visa, Panasonic etc…), the London partners (Adidas, Lloyds) and also some brands that sponsor Team GB athletes individually (Powerade/Jessica Ennis, British Gas/Swimming team, Braun/Jenna Randall).
The topline results show:
• Large sponsorships pay off in social: median growth of Worldwide Olympic Partners page likes was almost 2x that of London 2012 Olympic partners and 3x that of Individual Sponsors
• Smaller sponsors, however, still saw significant growth in fan base followings
• The immense fan growth of the Worldwide Olympics Partners can likely be attributed to a combination of Olympics-related coverage and paid media
• All three categories saw median growth in the social media audiences with the Premium Sponsors seeing the most (12%), the London Partners coming second (7%) and the individual sponsors seeing 4%
• The big winners in the Premium section where Atos, Visa and Samsung, who experienced 39%, 29% and 19% growth on Facebook respectively. However, when you look at this in real numbers, the order is actually reversed, as Samsung gained nearly 2 million new followers, compared to Visa’s 560,000 and Atos’ 3,000
• McDonald’s only saw 2% growth, equating to 350,000 fans
• For the London Partners, Lloyds TSB was a big winner, seeing 68% growth, while British Airways, with its “Home Advantage” campaign also saw 12% growth.
• For the individual sponsors, golden girl Jessica Ennis certainly helped Powerade and Olay, seeing a respective 16% and 3% boost on Facebook
• Finally, Chevin Country Park Hotel in Otley sponsor the Brownlee brothers (gold and bronze winners in the triathlon and also from Otley). They are likely to be the smallest sponsors, but it saw a ten percent uplift in followers
Source: http://www.wildfireapp.com/
