It is just unbelievable the speed at which Social Media spreads news. Till now “news spread like wild-fire” was a phrase generally used – but now, I guess, experts will have to come up with a new phrase to define the speed at which Social Media spreads news.
Sysomos, a Social Media analytics company, who monitor billions of conversations happening on Blogs, Twitters & Facebook’s of the world, throws out some numbers which are truly astonishing! Here is a quick look at it…
President Obama’s 10 minute address let the world know that “Osama Bin Laden was killed” – This happened at 11:45 pm (Eastern Standard Time).
Within next 15 minutes there were over 583,017 tweets, 796 blog mentions, 801 news mentions and 1751 forum postings.
Contents
12:00 am Midnight (15 minutes after the address)
By 2am which is around 2hr 15 mins from the Obama address, more than a million tweets were posted on twitter along with 6897 blog mentions, 7460 news mentions and 9416 forum postings had been published.
2:00 am Activity (2 hrs 15 mins after the address)
In less than 10 hrs from the event 2.2 millions tweets were posted – around 40,000 news / blog mentions & 55,000 forum postings were published.
9:30 am Activity (9 hrs 45 mins after the address)
Twitter Geo-Location Map
As expected US & UK people were talking the most, but tweets about it were getting published through-out the world!
In less than 10 hrs Millions of people across the globe not only knew about the event but were also talking and interacting about it on Social Media sites.
Events like these truly show the power of Social Media in action!
@ Arun,
The following link shows the social media covered the same event even faster (as the action is happening) unlike Obama telling people.
http://en.news.maktoob.com/20090000721100/Raid_against_Osama_bin_Laden_captured_on_Twitter/Article.htm
nice article! The only scary part is, rumors can also spread fast causing panic.