Twitter Makes Tracking Winter Olympics Easy With Long List Of #Sochi2014 Accounts

In time for tonight’s Sochi Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, Twitter is offering users a number of ways to follow their favorite Olympic events and athletes.

Along with the #Sochi2014 hashtag, the site listed the following accounts on its Twitter blog yesterday to track the winter games:

• @Olympics
• @Sochi2014
• @USOlympic
• @NBCOlympics
• List of U.S. athletes
• List of participating countries, teams and broadcast partners

Twitter also created two pages of Olympic-related resources, one for Team US Olympic accounts and the other for global Olympic accounts.

According to Twitter data, Japan, Russia and the Netherlands were the top three countries for most Olympic tweets posted over the last week (the US ranked 7th). The site also mapped #SOCHI tweets in eight different languages:

Currently, Twitter claims Shaun White is the most followed Olympian on its site, followed by South Korean figure skater Yuna Kim. Two other American athletes made the list of top five most followed Olympians as well, Patrick Kane and Lolo Jones.

As expected, Twitter’s not the only site gearing up for tonight’s winter games. Yesterday, Google posted an Olympic logo on its homepage, protesting Russia’s anti-gay legislation. Bing refrained from being controversial, offering users a number of new features to track Olympic events and athletes, including an Olympic Gold Medal counter.

Marketing Land contributor Gary Price has also put together a comprehensive list of Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics fact sheets and guidebooks on Infodocket.com.

Earlier this week, finding information about this year’s winter games wasn’t so easy. In a story published two days ago on our partner site at Search Engine Land, Marketing Land editor Ginny Marvin discovered a simple search for “When do the Olympics opening ceremonies start?” didn’t garner quite the results she expected:

Who knew a simple question would be so hard to answer? Yesterday I searched across all three engines to find out more about the Olympic opening ceremonies and when they start. I quickly discovered that the official website of NBC, which is broadcasting the games in the U.S., had nothing about the ceremonies or when they’ll air in the States.  So back to the search engines I went, chronicling my odd experiences along the way.

You can read Marvin’s full article on how Bing, Yahoo and Google performed when it came to Olympic searches at: “When Do the Olympics Opening Ceremonies Start?” Search Engines Compete to Answer.