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November 07, 2012

Twitter Also Wins During the Elections

By Brittany Walters-Bearden, TMCnet Contributor

Social media site Twitter (News - Alert) was a winner last night during the Presidential elections when it handily dealt with the huge traffic of users on its site. The statistics for last night’s usage of the social media platform are absolutely staggering.



When President Barack Obama was projected to win the election by network and cable stations across the country at 11:19 Eastern Standard Time, Twitter was easily handling the 327,453 tweets (messages sent by Twitter users) per minute. Dick Costolo (News - Alert), CEO of Twitter, said, “Wow. The tweets they are many. Incredible." 

To determine the strain on Twitter, tweets are measured in tweets per second, rather than tweets per minute; this shows the spontaneity of how Twitter is used. Even though the magic moment of the election result at 11:19 was measured by that moment in time, which is not how Twitter is typically measured, it was not in Twitter’s Top 10 moments in Twitter history.

When the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences presented the Oscars in February, there was an average of 18,000 tweets per second or more than one million tweets per minute. The moment of the announcement was only tweeted at 5,458 tweets per second. The 2012 Super Bowl had a heavy amount of traffic on Twitter with the end of the New York Giants versus the New England Patriots game garnering 12,233 per second and Madonna’s halftime performance had Tweeters “talking” at 10,245 tweets per second.

The 2012 election has now set a new record for Twitter by having the most tweets in political history. By the end of the night, there had been more than 31.7 million tweets sent by Twitter users. This, by far, surpassed the tweets sent out during the 2008 election when the number of tweets only reached 10 million.




Edited by Brooke Neuman
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