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As Ellen’s selfie shatters records, Twitter offers a full breakdown of Oscars-night tweeting

twitter offers stats on tweets from the oscars retweet record
Image used with permission by copyright holder

As Ellen DeGeneres’ record-breaking Oscars selfie continues to be retweeted at a rapid clip (it’s now well beyond the 3.2-million mark), Twitter’s head of media science on Wednesday offered up some stats from the big night, giving us a bit of insight into just how engaged users were with the microblogging service as the gongs were being handed out on TV.

Here’s what we have so far, with all figures relating to the time-frame from Sunday 5pm ET to Monday 5am ET:

– There were a total of 3.3 billion impressions of Oscars-related tweets.

– 19.1 million Oscar-related tweets were posted.

– The tweets were sent by more than 5 million people.

– More than 37 million people viewed these tweets across Twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile and desktop applications. That’s nearly as many as the 43 million people who watched the show.

By the way, that “impressions” stat relates to how many times a tweet was displayed to users – you might also refer to it as “views.” Many of these views will have occurred outside the Twitter platform, such as on Facebook, or when a tweet is embedded in a blog post or article on any website. So, with DeGeneres’ famous selfie embedded below, simply visiting this webpage will have counted as another view for that particular tweet, as well as for Twitter itself.

It’s a figure Twitter doesn’t usually highlight when it rolls out stats for big events like the Oscars, suggesting a move toward trying to appeal more to advertisers by demonstrating the extent of the social media site’s reach.

To give a clearer idea about how one tweet can reach millions of people, Twitter’s Michael Fleischman took Degeneres’ popular Sunday night post and created an ‘anatomy of a tweet’ diagram, shown below. So as you can see, it may have been retweeted several million times, but it’s now had at least 32.8 million views.

[via Marketing Land]

anatomy of a tweet
Image used with permission by copyright holder
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Trevor Mogg
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