Team GB: The Social Media Rankings 8/8

We’ve been keeping our beady eyes sharply focused on the ‘lympics this week, bringing you a piece on understanding the validity of tracking Olympic sponsorship, one on the next generation of British stars, a mathematical demonstration of how the winner takes it all and even an interactive buzz tracker for the brands at London 2012.

Today and for the remainder of the Olympics, we’re bringing you a daily update of how the Team GB athletes are being discussed on social media, ranking the competitors in order of online buzz.

We’ve looked at the past 24 hours – well, the ones that fit into the 7th August – to see which sports men and women were being chatted about online, and checked to see how they’ve changed since the previous day.

So with no further ado, witness the top ten members of team GB, as ranked by volume of online mentions:

Our pals over at Ipsos helped us compile the data, which shows a number of interesting results.

Chris Hoy, who has all the ingredients for social media success – a national hero and a gold winner yesterday – easily heads up the top of the table.

The less-recognised Laura Trott follows him in second place, no doubt due to her brilliant world-record-setting victory in the Women’s Team Pursuit recently, as well as nabbing her second gold in three days, after picking up the medal in the Omnium yesterday

The rest of the table is made up from yesterday’s medal winners: Alistair Brownlee, Jonny Brownlee, Victoria Pendleton and Nick Dempsey; as well as more generally popular Olympic stars with the legacy to remain in the limelight despite not performing at all on the day: Andy Murray, Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and Bradley Wiggins.

It appears that legacy and recency of success both play a major factor in determining social media buzz, and if you couple them together then the effect is magnified. Stay tuned for the results of today’s online chatter here on our blog tomorrow.