Part Two: Social Best Practices from the Olympic Winners

This is the second post in a three part series recapping the 2016 Rio Olympics on social. Part One featured the Olympic winners on social and Part Three will dive into how these social performances can be tied to business objectives. Our recent Olympics recap webinar can be downloaded by clicking here or viewed by clicking here. In Part Two, we will explore the various social best practices that Olympic brand sponsors utilized to drive social engagement. As a refresher from Part One, here were the top performing Team USA and Rio Olympics’ brand sponsors by social engagement:

The best way to introduce this section is to talk about video. 22% of NBC Olympic’s social content was video and it drove nearly 50% of its social actions. 36% of Nike’s social content was video, driving 78% of the brand’s overall social actions.

The common themes that we saw appear time and time again among the other Rio Olympics and Team USA sponsors’ top social content were all captured in these videos posted by NBC Olympics and Nike. These themes include exciting, inspiring and heartwarming moments, as well as behind-the-scenes looks of brands and athletes in Rio.

Life isn’t about finding your limits. It’s about realizing you have none. https://t.co/4SuOIuArFW #justdoithttps://t.co/nyoepePrWd

— Nike (@Nike) August 5, 2016

To inspire your social content strategies, here are several examples of how Olympic sponsors utilized the aforementioned themes to drove their top social content:

Heartwarming

Nothing stops Ashton and Brianne from being each other’s number one fan! #TeamVisa #Rio2016 pic.twitter.com/sYHlNZka2e

— Visa (@Visa) August 16, 2016

Excitement

Ready for #Rio2016 to begin? #TeamUSA is! #THATSGOLD pic.twitter.com/HYpuxusZdL

— Coca-Cola (@CocaCola) August 6, 2016

Inspiration

#India proved that pride makes anything possible. #ArtisticGymnastics #DoWhatYouCant pic.twitter.com/uX5vhEbtF9

— Samsung Mobile (@SamsungMobile) August 14, 2016

Behind-the-Scenes

*Bonus* Have Fun with Partnerships!

Chobani utilized its partnership with various Team USA athletes like Alex Morgan to run a contest giving away autographed Chobani swag and encouraging its audience to participate by posting pictures of quotes on their favorite flavors of Chobani.

Smucker’s partnered with Bustle and the United States Olympic Committee to run their game promotion. Bustle promoted the game which was a PB&J trivia quiz on their site, and after users completed the game, they were encouraged to tweet #PBJ4TEAMUSA to donate $1 to Team USA.

Stay tuned for the final post in this three-part series showing how these Olympic sponsors (and you!) can tie social performance to business objectives. In the meantime, you can read Part One of this series and download the full presentation by clicking here or view it by clicking here.