President Obama Sets New Social Media Record
CNBC Social Media Producer
President Barack Obama set new social media records on Election Night.
Shortly after NBC News projected that Obama had been re-elected as President of the United States, Barack Obama's Twitter account sent out a tweet with the text "4 more years," along with a photo of the President hugging First Lady Michele Obama. After 54 minutes, the post generated more than 318,000 retweets (shares of the original post) – the most retweets in Twitter's history.
By Wednesday afternoon, the post received more than 703,650 retweets and 242,240 favorites, similar to "likes" on Facebook.
Speaking of Facebook, Obama set a record there, too.
The Obama campaign posted the same photo to Facebook, where it became the "most-liked Facebook photo of all time," according to the company's Journalism Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik. Once the photo surpassed 2.1 million likes it broke the record. The social world's most viral photo ever generated 3.5 million likes, 170,000 comments and 460,000 shares by Wednesday afternoon.
A large portion of the tech world was expecting Twitter, a site known for its temporary outages and downtime to hiccup on, arguably, its biggest day to date. But, the site's infamous Fail Whale image, which appears when Twitter is experiencing an outage, was no where to be seen Tuesday night.
Although the microblog saw 300,000 tweets-per-minute on Election Night, Twitter never once experienced an outage.
"On Election Day, conversations around the election totaled 32 million tweets," Twitter told CNBC.com in an email. "Conversation peaked at 327,452 Tweets Per Minute when the broadcast networks called Barack Obama winning reelection for a second term."
"RIP, Fail Whale," tweeted Twitter Designer Doug Bowman.
email: tech@cnbc.com
