If you’re reading this and you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, I’m betting you probably checked Twitter during the game between one and a thousand times. How do I know? Because Twitter just released some data today about tweets during the game — and they’re huge.
Specifically, there were a number of points during the game that set a new record for tweets per second (TPS — yes, they call it “TPS”) for a sporting event. The previous record of 3,283 TPS during last year’s World Cup was first eclipsed during the Packers’ first touchdown of the day. Then it kept getting passed on every subsequent score (except the Steeler’s field goal), before finally exploding during the half-time show.
The fact that the half-time show seemed to be a total debacle clearly helped Twitter, as everyone went to their phones to make fun of the spectacle. Those tweets peaked when Usher descended from the rafters, apparently.
But the all-time sports TPS record was actually set at the end of the game. When the Packers finally won, some 4,064 tweets per second were being sent. Insane. But in some context, this isn’t all that close to the all-time TPS record, which is 6,939 tweets per second during New Year’s in Japan. The fact that the entire country is on the same timezone helped push them past the U.S. in that regard.
The most talked about person during the Super Bowl was apparently Usher, followed by The Black Eyed Peas, Slash, Eminem (who was in two commercials), and Christina Aguilera. Yep — not a single actual football player was in the top 5. The highest player was game MVP Aaron Rodgers who place sixth. That’s fairly ridiculous.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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