A couple weeks back, I wrote up about how Chinese social network Sina Weibo got big numbers during the 2012 Summer Olympics’ opening ceremony at London. Now that the Olympics ended yesterday, how did Sina Weibo do during the past two weeks with their country being one of the frontrunners for the most gold medals? Turns out that it had twice as many messages as Twitter did throughout the games. The Chinese microblogging site officially released their numbers this morning, which 393 million messages were sent in the last two weeks related to the Olympics. Twitter, by comparison, had about 150 million tweets sent about the games. Sina’s numbers, however, did not respond whether or not reposts and comments were included in the 393 million.

Since this is the first Olympics with the social networking boom, these are outstanding numbers for Sina Weibo and Twitter. Facebook has not released any official numbers of how many status updates related to the games yet, assuming they do release numbers after significant events like this. It will be interesting to see if they do, since it is more worldwide than Twitter, but probably not as much as Sina’s 393 million messages. In terms of how many visits the big Chinese microblogging sites got during the Olympics according to Hitwise, Sina led with 310 million, Tencent was second with 200 million, Sohu had 120 million visits, and Netease last with 40 million. Twitter usually had certain athletes trending and it is the same case for the Chinese sites. Swimmers Ye Shiwen and Sun Yang, gymnast Feng Zhe, and hurdler Liu Xiang were the trending athletes on the Chinese microblogging sites as far as being the most discussed. It was another great year for the Olympics in terms of ratings and numbers on various forms of media especially for the social networking realm. I do expect the same success in two years when the Winter Olympics happen for Sina Weibo and other country-specific social networking sites.