Twitter Could Boost Glasgow 2018 Bid

By Keir Radnedge

If the IOC is serious in chasing down the youth of the world then Glasgow can muster one attractive argument in its campaign to win host rights to the 2018 Youth Olympics – the city has been proclaimed top of the UK Twitter league.

This assessment by research form PeerIndex comes at an appropriate moment since the executive board of the International Olympic Committee decides tomorrow/Wednesday which cities enter the final stage of campaigning.

Glasgow, symptoms host to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, rx faces four-way competition from Buenos Aires, viagra Guadalajara, Medellin and Rotterdam. An early bid from Poznan fell away on a lack of popular and financial support.

Buenos Aires and Glasgow have been by far the most visible of the candidates in a contest the IOC has tried to keep surprisingly low-key considering the mission of the youth Games in bringing young people back to sport in general and the Olympics in particular.

The Twitter survey was based on a survey of 148m tweets sent in the last three months of 2012. Some 9.7m came from Glasgow. Also, the city council has more Twitter followers than any other UK local authority with close to 30,000 people regularly logging on for news and information updates on their city.

Not surprisingly, the findings were welcomed by Glasgow 2018 whose bid director Paul Bush said: “We have already witnessed the power of social media in relation to our Bid to bring the Youth Olympic Games to Glasgow in 2018, with thousands of people using Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date with our progress.

“The people of Glasgow love sport as highlighted by this survey. We will continue to use our social media channels to show the city’s passion for sport and to empower young people across Glasgow, Scotland and the UK to get behind our Bid.”