Olympics generates 150 million tweets, beating US election, Super Bowl and Euro 2012
Twitter has revealed the biggest conversations which took place via the social media site in 2012, with the London Olympics topping the charts with 150 tweets, with the closing ceremony leading to over 116,000 tweets per minute.
The largest competition-related conversation took place when Usain Bolt won the 200m sprint, which led to 80,000 tweets per minute.
Over 31 million tweets were sent about the US election on the day it took place, with the conversation peaking at 327,452 tweets per minute, while the first presidential debate led to 10 million tweets.
At the same time, Barack Obama’s ‘4 more years’ tweet led to over 810,000 retweets and 300,000 favourites: making it the most retweeted comment of all time.
The MTV Video Music Awards also led to a flurry of tweets, with over 52 million votes cast via twitter for the “Most Sharable Video” for this year’s MTV Video Music Awards show. Tweets for the VMAs peaked when One Direction won Best Pop Video, with 98,307 tweets per minute.
There were 13.7 million Super Bowl-related tweets during the American football game; with one million of them appearing in the final 5 minutes.
Superstorm Sandy was also a huge conversation on Twitter this year, with 20 million tweets about Sandy’s impact and aftermath being sent between 27 October and 1 November.
Euro 2012, Whitney Houston and the UEFA Champions League semi-final were also amongst the top topics of the year.