Florida Gators
Clay Court Champs (Day 3)
Former Gators Tebow and Wambach own special place in Twitter's record book
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 | Football, Soccer, Women's Tennis, Scott Carter
In the social media universe we now live in, Twitter is a huge planet.
Twitter ranks second only to Facebook in terms of regular users according to eBizmba.com, a website that regularly tracks traffic on popular social networking sites.
So it's no small feat that the two athletes primarily responsible for the two most tweeted-about sporting events in Twitter's history are Gators: Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow and women's soccer star Abby Wambach.
On its official feed Monday, Twitter posted this message to its nearly 7.3 million followers: “Last night @TimTebow led the @Denver_Broncos to an overtime playoff win and a new sports Tweets-per-second record: 9420.”
If you were on Twitter Sunday night when Tebow threw an 80-yard touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas on the first play of overtime against the Steelers, well, you understand. Denver's 29-23 win and Tebow's pass set off the fireworks.
Tebow and TebowTime, @TimTebow and simply Tebow seemed to pop up in every other Tweet regardless of who you follow.
Tebow's 9,420 tweets-per-second equals approximately one million tweets every 1 minute, 46 seconds. The previous record for a sporting event was set in July when the U.S. Women's World Cup – led by Wambach -- generated 7,196 tweets-per-second during a shootout loss to Japan in the tournament final.
By comparison, the 2011 Super Bowl generated 4,064 tweets-per-second; Dallas' win over the Heat in the NBA Finals led to 5,531 tweets-per-second, and the Major League Baseball home-run derby in July generated an average of 4,995 tweets-per-second.
Tebow's touchdown pass actually broke the tweets-per-second record for any event on American soil, surpassing the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards when Beyonce's announcement that she was pregnant sparked 8,868 tweets-per-second.
What is the world record?
That belongs to the debut of the Anime movie “Castle in the Sky” in Japan on Dec. 9, 2011. The event generated 25,088 tweets-per-second.
It's obvious American football fans have a way to go to catch up with Japanese movie fans on Twitter.
