Twitter has reported a new record for the highest sustained rate of tweets between 10:45 p.m. Sunday and 2:20 a.m. Monday. The news of the killing of Osama bin Laden generated an average of 3,000 tweets per second, peaking at 5,106 tweets per second at 11 p.m. — while this year’s Super Bowl, which previously held the sustained tweets record, saw 3,000 tweets per second for only 20 minutes.
New Year’s Eve in Japan still has the all-time tweets per second record of 6,939. Here’s a look at some where tweets per second peaked during other noteworthy news or sporting events:
- New Year’s Eve in Japan, Dec. 31, 2010: 6,939
- Japanese earthquake and tsunami, March 11, 2011: 5,530
- Death of bin Laden, May 1-2, 2011: 5,106
- 2011 Super Bowl, Feb. 6, 2011: 4,064
- Royal Wedding, April 29, 2011: 3,966
- Japan vs. Denmark, World Cup, June 24, 2010: 3,283
- 2010 NBA finals, Game 7, June 17, 2010: 3,085
Twitter was one source that alerted many to the breaking news, along with Facebook and news sites. Fast Company offers a good timeline of events on Twitter.
Meanwhile, social media monitoring site Sysomos noted that “In less than 12 hours since the tweeting began we saw almost 40,000 blog post and news articles and an astounding 2.2 million tweets all talking about Osama Bin Laden.” Their map attempts to visualize how the news spread on Twitter: