Tracking our Olympians
We began tracking U.S. Olympians’ social media performance and follower counts across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram seven days prior to the Games and continued until a week after the Olympic flame was extinguished. Athletes were classified by their best medal finish over the course of this year’s competition.
In order to isolate the growth effect of the Olympics, we excluded individual athletes competing as members of a team. Examples include men's basketball player Kevin Durant and women's soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Throughout the report, all individual medals will be attributed to athletes, whereas team medals will be attributed to national governing bodies.
U.S. 2020 Olympic Medal Count
Of the 78 accounts observed, five were identified as outliers due to the size of their audiences (2M+). The growth timelines displayed here illustrate the justification for their exclusion. With entities such as Simone Biles and USA Basketball excluded, the impact of a Gold Medal performance is properly represented. The top step of the podium produces a 20% larger growth effect than either other medal. Silver Medal performances surprisingly yielded less growth than third-place finishes. However, after assessing the data further, this effect appears to be a result of the quantity of NGBs (6) that finished with a Silver Medal. As you will see in the following section, NGB accounts drew exponentially less growth than athlete accounts.
Follower Growth Per Medal
Greatest of All Time
Best of the Rest
USA Gymnastics, meanwhile, experienced much stronger growth (+6.2%) over the course of the Olympics due to the team’s impressive performance sans Simone Biles. The unit rounds out the list of entities who left Tokyo with more than 2 million cumulative followers.
All-Around Champion
Group Mentality
Stars Shine Brightly
Suni’s Fast Track to Stardom
Overnight Celebrities
Objectively, Dressel was the United States’ most successful Olympian at this year’s Games, earning three individual Gold Medals. Along with that hardware came more than twice as many followers as he had upon arrival in Tokyo. Skinner capitalized on her opportunity to compete with a Silver Medal performance in vault, which helped catapult her past six of her peers in terms of audience size by the end of the competition. Meanwhile, Eaton’s Bronze Medal run during skateboarding’s Olympic debut led to 113K new followers — a 33% increase — in just 24 hours.
Rounding Out the Field
Post Value Generated
By means of MVP’s valuation methodology, these elements are weighted and modeled, producing a Social Value figure representing the total potential value of a post. Within the following section, we will reexamine the medalists’ growth during the Olympics through the lens of social value.
Taking a step back, we grouped player and team accounts by sport to observe when each primarily drew attention and the degree to which they did so, as illustrated by daily follower growth. As one may expect, gymnastics dominated this year’s Olympics narrative, particularly on July 29th, when Sunisa Lee claimed a Gold Medal in the women’s all-around competition. Athletics took precedence during the latter half of the Games, while swimming was relatively impactful throughout Tokyo 2020. Skateboarding, golf, and wrestling entities all experienced noteworthy growth as well.
Sunisa Lee’s success during the Olympics helped her earn a 17% share of social value among entities with fewer than 2 million followers. The USA Swimming and USA Volleyball team accounts each contributed more than $2.5M in value, while USA Baseball and USA softball combined for $1.3M in their sports’ Olympic returns. Despite far fewer medalists, swimming entities collectively outperformed their athletics counterparts as a result of Caeleb Dressel and Katie Ledecky’s presences.
Having assessed the medalists’ performances — from the perspectives of both audience size and social value production — we created sortable breakdowns of their key metrics. The tables allow for toggling between data highlighting change over the course of the Olympics, total performance, and average performance. Additionally, we have showcased three of the Games’ biggest winners: Sunisa Lee, Caeleb Dressel, and Sydney McLaughlin.
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