The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, spoke at the Democratic National Convention tonight and broke some Twitter records (for politics) while he was at it, according to the company.
Extra points to Twitter, the site didn’t go down or falter once during the entire speech.
A new record political moment on Twitter: @barackobama drives 52,757 Tweets per minute. Over 9 million Tweets sent about #DNC2012.
— Twitter Government (@gov) September 7, 2012
The people listened…and tweeted in droves during his entire speech. The numbers dwarfed those seen during the Republican National Convention (4M total), and are absolutely jaw-dropping.
The President out-drew his first lady, Michelle Obama, whose speech made waves itself.
Whether you’re a political junkie or not, it’s fascinating to watch an entire network of people join a discussion during huge global events. Now, not all of the tweets per minute were about the speech, there is indeed the MTV Music Video Awards going on, but it’s safe to say that the bulk of the chatter during the very specific time-frame of the speech were related.
In a blog post discussing the record-setting evening in greater detail, Twitter shares how far the service has really come in the past few years:
Today alone, there were more than 4 million Tweets written specifically about the convention. For context, there were only 1.8 million total Tweets sent globally, about all topics on Election Day in 2008.
Here are some of the President’s biggest Twitter spikes:
-43,646: “I’m no longer just the candidate, I’m the President”
-39,002: “I will never turn medicare into a voucher”
-38,597: Discussing Medicare
-37,694: “We don’t think government can solve all our problems…”
-34,572: Quips about the Olympics and “Cold War mind warp”
It will fun to see how many memes make their way out of the speech, as this one has already gotten going on Twitter:
Isn’t real-time grand?
[Photo credit: Tim Shey]
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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