Usain Bolt Wins Most Olympic Mentions on Twitter, Facebook

Usain Bolt Wins Most Olympic Mentions on Twitter, Facebook

The legend of Usain Bolt is spreading through social media.

The Jamaican sprinter -- who repeatedly claimed legendary status after his phenomenal performance Saturday -- was the most-mentioned Olympian on both Facebook and Twitter during the London Games, beating out American swimmer Michael Phelps.

Bolt inspired 80,000 tweets per minute during his 200-meter race, and 74,000 during his 100- meter. Tweets about Bolt were among 150 million Olympics tweets in all over the 16 days of the games.

Also read: Olympics Break Viewing Record

Andy Murray yielded the next most tweets per minute -- 57,000 -- as he won the gold in the men's tennis singles. Bolt's relay team was responsible for the next-most tweets per minute -- 52,000 -- during the men 4 x 100 relay.

Bolt was one of nine Olympians who yielded more than 1 million Twitter mentions. The others were Michael Phelps, Tom Daley, Ryan Lochte, Gabby Douglas, Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei and LeBron James.

Bolt now has 8 million fans on Facebook, beating Phelps' 6.2 million. Phelps also scored the most "Likes" of any post for a quote attributed to Dr. Seuss: "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." It has 270,000 likes and counting.

Douglas had the greatest increase in fans: The gold-medal gymnast's number of them increased nearly 4,000 percent to more than 597,000.

Related Articles:

Olympics Break Viewership Record

Ratings: Olympics Closing Ceremony Way Up