Osama Bin Laden is dead.
You may have heard that last night or this morning. It has been all over the television, Twitter, Facebook. Really, any medium that you can possibly think of almost anywhere in the world has been entirely devoted to the death of Bin Laden.
Twitter was especially important in spreading the news. Social media monitoring company Sysomos was curious about just how fast and how much volume was created by the death of Bin Laden and broke down the numbers. Within 12 hours of the news being broken around 10:30 p.m. EST (UTC-4), there had been 40,000 blog posts and an incredible 2.2 million tweets.
Sysomos’s numbers come as little surprise yet the volume and reach across the world was certainly impressive. Sysomos reported that around 11:45 p.m. EST, right around the time that the president was finishing his remarks, 583,017 tweets had been posted with 796 blog mentions. After Obama’s address the blog mentions took off with 2,205 by 12:30 a.m. EST and 16,704 by 4 a.m. EST.
Sysomos posted a map of where the news was coming from. Mostly the news was concentrated in the United States but Bin Laden was a high-profile name across the world and tweets came in from all corners of the globe.
Even FourSquare got in on the act with people checking into a “Post Bin Laden World” as well as the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan where the firefight and killing of Bin Laden happened. Sysomos reported that by 10 a.m. EST there were 11,570 FourSquare check-ins related to Bin Laden.
Update: @TwitterGlobalPR has tweeted some factoids this afternoon. Twitter saw its highest rate of tweets per second last night with the peak coming with 5,106 at 11:00 p.m. EST. Between 10:45 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. EST Twitter average 3440 tweets per second. It is notable that Twitter did not crash under the load. A year ago at this time Twitter was having problems surrounding people tweeting about the soccer World Cup. This year the most notorious man in the world is killed and the company can handle it fine.
