Super Bowl XLVI just became America’s most tweeted sporting event : DumpServer.co.uk

Super Bowl XLVI just became America’s most tweeted sporting event

Super Bowl XLVI just became America’s most tweeted sporting event after the game between the New England Patriots and New York Giants hit a record average of 10,000 tweets per second (TPS), according to Twitter.

In the final three minutes of the Super Bowl tonight, there were an average of 10,000 Tweets per second.

— Twitter (@twitter) February 6, 2012

The news should not come as any surprise as Twitter continues to grow, both in terms of users and activity, which makes every Super Bowl more interactive and social than the previous year’s. Indeed, using the same logic, next year’s US election is tipped to be the most social one ever.

The new record is ahead of the previous US sporting high of 8,000 TPS that were seen last month when Tim Tebow threw an 80 yard touchdown pass as the Denver Broncos beat the Steelers in overtime. However, the new US sports record is some way behind the worldwide record on Twitter, which saw 25,088 TPS during the broadcast of a popular anime movie in Japan.

Twitter’s own record was recently smashed by Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo which recorded 32,312 messages per secord during the first minute after Chinese New Year, as the country celebrated the festive online.

According to unofficial data posted at badcheese.com – which has a host of interesting charts relating to Super Bowl tweets – the number of mentions of the Super Bowl rose noticeably during Madonna’s half time performance:

Eric Falcao of social platform Mass Relevance speculated that the star’s performance may have seen up to 50,000 tweets posted per minute. If true, that would be lower than the 10,000 TPS recorded by Twitter, but yet the peak relating to Madonna’s references appears higher in the chart above.

Twitter is notoriously difficult to measure so we’ll take it that Madonna’s efforts drew less attention, that’s unless Twitter says any different. That’s probably the right thing as the game should be the main attention grabber, at the end of the day.