Los Angeles — This year’s Super Bowl generated a whole lot of chatter. The Super Bowl XLV showdown between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers not only just set an all-time TV ratings record, but it also set a record at Twitter, too — the most tweets per second of any sporting event with 4,064 during the Super Bowl Sunday, the microblogging service announced Wednesday.
It may or may not startle you, but the Super Bowl XLV game has certainly helped set a record when it came to sports-related tweets. At 10:07:16 p.m. ET — one of the most crucial moments of the game — when 4,064 tweets were sent, the highest number of tweets sent in a single second during a sporting event.
Photo: AP/David J. Phillip
But the cool part is a post on the official Twitter Blog that unfurled the astonishing figure yesterday, “During the final moments of the game, fans sent 4,064 Tweets per second (TPS) — the highest TPS for any sporting event. That spike shattered the previous record in the sporting world: the 3,283 TPS sent during Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark during last summer’s World Cup.”
That is a healthy jump, and more than that, global Twitter usage actually broke that record six times during Sunday’s contest. The graph below which displays each Twitter spike with events in the game. The second-highest peak occurred when Usher made a surprise appearance during halftime show.
In fact, Usher was the most tweeted-about person of the Super Bowl, and the Black Eyed Peas’s halftime show performance. followed by Slash, Eminem, and Christina Aguilera. Aaron Rodgers, the most mentioned player, was sixth.
Click to enlarge…
Moreover, with Twitter being Twitter, the company has released a helpful chart that helps illustrate the spikes in TPS (or tweets per second) that occurred during various points of the game.
You should be able to glean additional information from the graph above. As you can see, the first record-breaking occurred when eventual-Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers hit wide receiver Jordy Nelson for the game’s first touchdown.
Surprisingly, all of the Super Bowl hoopla could not add up to the creation of an all-time Twitter usage record, however. The record of 6,939 tweets per second Japanese users set four seconds after midnight on January 1st stands by a significant margin.