Things have changed a lot in recent years–technology and social networks are now part of our everyday lives and things are constantly changing, forever revolutionizing the way we live.

The London Olympic Games, one of the most important global events with massive coverage, could go down in history as the event that managed to take the full leap in communications with sports fans through online services Facebook and Twitter, telling an interesting story in big data.

In the Beijing Games four years ago, Facebook and Twitter were already part of a widespread phenomenon, but among the few where IOC played a secondary role. Quite the opposite of what happened in London this year – the two services are now accepted mainstream media and for months, long before the Olympic flame arrived in London, the organizers were working on their own platform for web-based cotent distribution as well.

We know of one firm, Thismoment, that helped NBC and many of the advertising brands leverage social media for the Olympic Games this year, proving the undeniable impact of social platforms in this day and age.

NetApp, a leader in enterprise storage and data management, has created an infographic illustrating the record-breaking impact of the Social Games and how much conversation and data was created during the Games, especially through social media.

Before the start of the games, the company had released another infographic showing the sheer volume of big data expected to be generated on a global scale by social networks, connected devices, and broadcasting networks.  Now we take a look at the aftermath, piecing together the data after the Games are done.

Big Data Smash Records on Social Media

The London Olympics will go down in history as the first truly social Olympics. After winning the gold medal in the 100 meters, Usain Bolt’s victory was felt far beyond the Olympic stadium in London. Shortly after the race ended, Twitter users pushed out 80,000 tweets per minute on the record-breaking race. Another athlete, the American artistic gymnast Gabby Douglas, registered an increase of 1522 percent in fan followers on Twitter during the games to 576,654 followers.

If these figures still don’t surprised you, maybe these will.  The opening ceremony of the Games saw 9.66 million Twitter users tweeting the grand opening coverage, topping the total number of Twitter posts during the entire 2008 Beijing games.

Other memorable Twitter moments include Andy Murray’s victory with 57,000 tweets per minute, and the team’s victory over the Spanish American in basketball with 41,000 tweets per minute.

Twitter’s Olympic users’ base increased to 845 million compared to 140 million during 2008 Beijing games, while Facebook users’ increased to 100 million against 6 million in 2008 games. The social sharing platform, Instagram was used to share 100,000 photos every day.

London Olympics Live

Unsurprisingly, live coverage has generated reams of content during the games. At the forefront of the London Olympics as a technical service provider involved in the audiovisual broadcast events, YouTube broadcast more than 3,500 hours of live coverage streams in 64 countries.

Additionally, one million of hours of live streaming were disseminated to deliver the communication infrastructure for Olympic Games and 220,000 hours of BT’s Wi-Fi were used across the Olympic venue. The British telecom company BT had used more than 500,000 Wi-Fi spots across London. Moreover, O2, UK’s leading network provider also offered free Wi-Fi hotspots in some of the busiest parts of London.