The social media records that took a tumble in 2012

As more and more companies and individuals take to social media as it gets integrated and entrenched deeper and deeper in to our daily lives — it is quite inevitable that social media records are going to be set and then broken at a rather quick pace. Let’s take a look at a few that made headlines in 2012.

A lot can be said about the way that US President Barack Obama has led and won his last two electoral campaigns. There was thought, diligent planning and careful data analysis of the US social graph that arguably led him to both of his victories. In 2008 he was a catalyst for change when we was the first presidential candidate to actively campaign through social media — and 2012 was no different. On election night, Twitter reported an average 327 452 tweets per minute number. In total, Twitter claims that over 31 000 000 tweets were sent on election night.

Obama broke another record when he tweeted “4 more years” as his final tweet on the evening to announce his victory. This tweet is the most retweeted tweet in history. This picture is also the most “liked” picture in Facebook’s history – imagine if we could measure “likes” when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

A mere 22 minutes after Obama tweeted those three words and the photo, it had been retweeted 342 833 times (incidentally, this tweet is now well over 800 000 in terms of retweets). Obama struck again with “this happened because of you” and this tweet sits in second place for most retweets at 248 000. And in 4th place is Obama once more with “We’re all in this together. That’s how we campaigned, and that’s who we are. Thank you. –bo”

This question is going to come up — so I have to include this against my better judgement. “Who is in third place?” I hear you demand. It’s Justin Beiber with “RIP Avalanna. i love you”.

I will save you the trouble of Googling it (because you so were going to); Avalanna was a six-year-old girl who passed away after she lost her battle with cancer; nicknamed “Mrs Justin Beiber” because she “married” Justin on Valentine’s Day last year.

Another record on another network

On Thanksgiving Thursday, Instagram was the network which had its records broken, with 226 Instagram pics being posted every second.

According to the network, there were over 10-million photos with “Thanksgiving-related words” in their captions between 10am and 3pm (US time) on the day.

It was the busiest day ever for Instagram, the Facebook-owned company that continues to pick up momentum with over 100-million users. Thursday’s big Thanksgiving day record broke the previous record of 1.3-million photos on the day Hurricane Sandy hit (I guess we can take it as a positive that good news was shared more than bad for a change).

Instagram itself was not the only one celebrating huge usage figures over thanksgiving; even websites like Seattle-based Allrecipes.com enjoyed their biggest Thanksgivings ever. In this case, a record-breaking 7.9-million users worldwide visited the site the day before Thanksgiving. Mobile devices accounted for 12-million visits to Allrecipes.com the week leading up to Thanksgiving Day, a 97% increase over the same period last year.

What records can we expect to see crash to the floor from here on and on which networks will they be seen?