Did you watch Obama's State of the Union address last night? Early predictions were that 50 million Americans were tuning in. I watched it and, for the first time for me for this kind of event, jumped in on Twitter to watch what others were saying about the speech and its coverage.
Discussion centred around the Twitter thread or hashtag #SOTU or State of the Union but I found that thread to be moving way too fast to keep up with or digest. And, anyhow, I thought it'd be fun to set up a hashtag or thread for Canadians watching Obama's speech so I called one at #CanSOTU and it was nice to see a whole pile of Canucks jump in on that one. (You can review my contribution to that debate here).
Barack Obama himself, proving that he actually is Superman, was tweeting as he was talking! For instance, as he said, “Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love”, he put it out on Twitter right away. Turns out, that was the single most re-tweeted line from his speech — with more than 2,000 people passing it along. The wags at BorowitzReport had the second most re-tweeted line from the night: “To tweet about the President's speech, use #SOTU. To tweet about Michele Bachmann's response, use #STFU.” That one got zipped around by more than 1,000 people.
Meanwhile, Tweetbeat, a Twitter monitoring service, crunched some global numbers about Twitter and the SOTU. Its findings:
- The 1 hour of the State of the Union speech – 100k+ tweets – The raw count is approximately 400k+
- This is more than:
- 10x the number of tweets during the Oscar nomination announcement in an hour (the other biggest news of the day)
- 20x the number of tweets during Pretty Little Liars last night
- 25x the number of tweets when it was determined that Green Bay was going to the Super Bowl
- This is more than: