The NFL bought the hashtag #NFLDraft today, but really should have done it on Thursday, the first day of The 2012 NFL Draft. Why? Because the League would have been in a better position to maintain its sports-related Twitter Tweets-Per-Second dominance, when the Indianapolis Colts selection of Andrew Luck was officially announced at the NFL Draft at Radio City Music Hall.
Instead, that NFL record was put to a temporary end, as the Chelsea v Barcelona soccer game held on the same day, set a new Twitter Tweets-Per-Second record.
According to CNET, the Chelsea v Barcelona 13,684 tweets per second were sent out around the World. That beat the last three minutes of Super Bowl 47, which clocked in at 12,233 tweets per second.
The overall record was set on December 9, 2011, when the Japanese movie, Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky”, caused a wild number of 25,088 – a new and still standing Twitter tweets-per-second record.
What’s the point of this?
As Twitter becomes the media center for the World, re-tweets and tweets-per-some-measure-of-time become important measures of audience engagement with entertainment and media products and platforms. All of that potentially impacts how much money advertisers would spend on a property like the NFL Draft.
Moreover, Twitter tweets are “impressions” – that is, they communicate something about a person, place, or thing that can also effect the reputation of that person, place, or thing. If it happens to be a bad product or a great movie, you can see how even just one Twitter tweet can come to communicate the news about that bad product or great movie – now imagine thousands of them per second.
See?
Also, how the owners of entertainment and media products and platforms cause more Twitter tweets can push possible tweets-per-second records. Had the NFL purchased the hashtag #NFLDraft on Thursday, and not Saturday, it would possibly have come closer to setting that record, rather than Chelsea V Barcelona. Why? Because those tweeting about Chelsea V Barcelona would be more likely to use the #NFLDraft hashtag in their tweets.
Stay tuned.
Bill Carroll