New Sport For the London Olympics: Tweeting

The London Olympics and Paralympic are a year away and they want you to get pumped up. They’re hosting a tweeting contest, a year in advance, to see which countries have the most number of tweeters. Twitter users need to go to the London Olympics website, select their team (countrywise or worldwide) and the hashtag generator will do its magic. Your tweet, if you personalize it, will look like “[personal message] #1YearToGo #[3 letter country code]   http://l2012.cm/qB4bRm”. India’s three letter country code is, unsurprisingly, IND. So far, the country is number 12 in the “top tweeted teams”, positioning us ahead of countries like Japan, Spain and France. Brazil is the top tweeter at the moment, followed by the US, Great Britain, Canada and El Salvador.

Tweet for your country

The contest includes more than just tweets; Flickr and YouTube submissions also count. Videos will be submitted to the London 2012 YouTube channel, and Flickr images must be tagged with ‘1YearToGo’ and the country you’re supporting. The Olympic Committee wants social media to play a huge role in the London 2012 Olympics, so much so that they’ve even encouraged the 10,500 athletes from 200 countries to take part in social media by blogging, tweeting and posting about their experiences, so long as they’re not doing it for commercial purposes.

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