According to the Twitter government and politics team, President Obama set a Twitter political record by driving 52,757 tweets per minute during his 38-minute convention speech Thursday night. The team added that his line, “I’m no longer just the candidate, I’m the President,” spurred the second biggest TPM spike for Obama with 43,646 tweets-per-minute, while “I will never turn Medicare into a voucher” scored the third highest with 39,002 TPM. The peak figure translates to almost 880 tweets-per-second, or total nonsense if you don’t believe Twitter has a role in shaping people’s attitudes about political moments.
By comparison, the First Lady peaked at 28,003 tweets per minute during her speech, with Bill Clinton at 22,087, while Romney topped out at only 14,289 TPM during his acceptance.
The Obama campaign is certainly keyed into Twitter political chatter: The campaign noticed that users were mocking Joe Biden’s affection for the word “folks,” and abuse of the word “literally,” so they turned it into lemonade. The Washington Post reports that the campaign took out an ad on the word “literally,” causing a promoted @BarackObama tweet to appear when users searched the word.
Twitter has grown substantially since 2008 when Obama ran for and won the presidency. That year, users sent 300,000 tweets per day, according to the Telegraph. On the company’s sixth birthday this March, it announced that its 140 million active users dispatched an astonishing 340 million tweets a day. Some users much more often than others, like Alec Baldwin who opined on the state of the race on Twitter yesterday, writing, “If Obama was white, he’d be up by 17 points.”
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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/obamas-speech-twitter-politics-record.html