The 2012 London Olympic Games has come and gone and, by all accounts, it was a great success. The Games saw record viewing figures across TV and the internet, and social media played a huge part in how we received information and updates, interacted with athletes and kept our sporting fingers very much on the pulse.

Ahead of the Olympics Twitter had expressed its desire to be the “official narrator” of the Games, and it certainly delivered on that count, with 150 million tweets sent during the competition.

But what was everybody tweeting about?

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The 2012 London Olympics are well underway and while China and the USA lead the medals table, Great Britain has had its most successful Games since it first hosted the event back in 1908. Team GB’s current tally of 22 golds and 48 total medals have surpassed its total at Beijing in 2008, and we still have a week to go. Not bad for a place roughly half the size of California.

Britain’s success aside, what London 2012 might most be remembered for is that this is the first truly social Olympics. Both Twitter and Facebook have seen remarkable growth over the last four years – Twitter has 23 times as many active users as it did in 2008 – and this, alongside the BBC’s world-beating television and online coverage (sorry NBC watchers) has led to an unprecedented level of social conversation.

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Would it surprise you to learn that 93 percent of social media users know that Michael Phelps competes in swimming?

Yep, that Michael Phelps. The one with 22 medals, 18 of them gold. The winningest athlete in Olympic history. 3 percent of folks thought he’d collected that haul in track and field.

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Four years is a long time in the regular old world of technology, but it’s an eternity in social media.

Since 2008, Twitter’s userbase has expanded almost one hundred times. Facebook has grown almost ten-fold (the latest user numbers are up to 955 million) and, perhaps most impressively, YouTube daily views have risen from 133 million to an incredible four billion per day.

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In most things in life, four years is a long time, but it’s a really long time in the world of tech and social media.

At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Twitter had a fraction of the userbase, credibility and mass media absorption that it does today – both in terms of profiles and tweets it’s literally hundreds of times bigger.

Of course, this growth in importance means taking a more serious approach to world events, and that includes the Olympics. For the London Games, Twitter has put together a page providing tips and suggestions for the athletes and other participants, and, come July 27th, the official @Olympics and @London2012 accounts will be guiding you every step of the way.

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