Everyone’s favourite micro-blogging platform had already been working pretty hard, but Twitter has taken additional steps to ensure that it, and not Facebook, is the social network of the 2012 London Olympics.

Twitter has partnered with NBC to become the “official narrator” of this year’s Games, and will setup a page that will host tweets from athletes, fans, broadcasters and TV personalities that will be heavily promoted by NBC during its Olympic coverage.

Twitter hopes that the partnership will help to attract a new audience to the network, boosting its userbase, which currently totals around 140 million active users – far behind Facebook’s 900 million plus.

“This is a way for new users to sample Twitter,” said Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s vice president of media.

While unconfirmed, the Olympic page may work in a style similar to that seen with Twitter’s NASCAR partnership. General Electric and Procter & Gamble are amongst the brands who will be buying ads on Twitter during the Olympics, but the partnership with NBC will not involve any money changing hands, and nor will the broadcast network share in Twitter’s ad revenue stream from the Olympic coverage.

(Source: Wall Street Journal.)