Paris 2024’s Winning Communication Strategy, Powered by Visibrain

Ahead of the Games: Laying the Groundwork and Staying Ahead of Potential Crises

Social media activity around Paris 2024 reached up to 5 million posts per day on average. To monitor such a high volume of conversation and anticipate potential crises, the Paris 2024 monitoring teams set up a highly structured alert system on Visibrain. The aim was to be notified in real time of any unusual activity on social media through the following:

• Alerts for sensitive topics: Security, transport, ticket prices, the cleanliness of the Seine, Aya Nakamura, and the geopolitical context were just some of the many crisis-prone subjects that surrounded the Games in the media and on social media before the official launch. With these alerts in place, the Paris 2024 teams were informed in real time whenever one of these sensitive topics was linked to the Games on social media.

• Alerts for post volume: The teams were also notified when activity, meaning the number of posts published about the Olympics, exceeded the usual threshold.

• Alerts for virality: Any post related to Paris 2024 that received more interactions than average, such as shares, retweets or comments, was immediately flagged to the monitoring teams.

• Alerts for key opinion leaders: Paris 2024 was also notified whenever an influential figure (e.g a journalist, politician, influencer or activist) spoke about the Games on social media.

This alert system ensured that the teams didn’t miss any significant information and helped them filter which insights to escalate to management in order to support informed decision-making.

During the Games: Monitoring Coverage in Real Time

The Olympic period generated 95 million posts on social media, a 54% increase compared to Tokyo 2021, including over 10 million posts about the opening ceremony alone and billions of interactions.

With such high volumes, identifying the most engaging content was a real challenge for the social media teams. Their main objective was to capture the public’s attention through an emotionally driven communication strategy.



To meet this goal, the social media teams relied on Visibrain’s sorting system. With just one click, this feature allows posts to be ranked by popularity, based on views, likes, shares, comments or total interactions. Below is an example showing the top Paris 2024 TikTok videos, ranked by the number of likes received:

This sorting system enabled the Paris 2024 teams to quickly identify which posts performed best on each platform and to adjust their communications accordingly.

After the Games: Assessing Performance

Before Paris 2024, no reference document existed on social media activity related to the Olympic Games, making any form of comparison difficult.

Evaluating the outcome of the event therefore had two objectives: to assess the success of Paris 2024 and to establish benchmarks for the Los Angeles 2028 teams, who will have access to statistics they can use for comparison.

To achieve this, the Paris 2024 monitoring and social media teams created a custom SMARTboard (dashboard) on Visibrain. This SMARTboard, fully tailored by the monitoring and social media teams, included several key indicators such as:

• Quantitative impact: Number of posts published, likes generated, online news articles, and users speaking about the Games.

• Qualitative impact: Most commonly used keywords (phrases and hashtags) associated with the event, most-used languages, top influencers and journalists, and a press review segmented by country and by level of virality.