Yesterday saw the ushering in of the Chinese New Year — and it seems that everyone who wasn’t busy setting off fireworks at the exact moment that the year of the snake started was instead posting to social media giant Sina Weibo. Sina has revealed that the very first second of the new year saw 34 977 Weibo posts. Yes, in just one second.
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That’s a new record for the Twitter-esque service, which last year saw 32,312 missives fired off in the first second of the new year. Back in 2011, it saw a mere 12 374 posts.
The next 59 seconds were just as impressive: Sina says that 731 102 Weibo posts were made in the very first minute of the lunar new year. That beats Twitter’s record of 327 000 tweets per minute when Barack Obama was re-elected as president.
During the seven hours of Chinese state television’s traditional Spring Gala show, some of Sina Weibo’s 400-million registered users live-tweeted the TV show using the “chunwan” hashtag. In total, that hashtag was used 19.5-million times while the show was on air.
As The Next Web points out, Sina Weibo saw more posts at the end of the Chinese new year than Twitter counted at the end of the Western new year. At its peak, the US-based social network clocked 33 388 tweets per second at midnight on 31 January 2012. The boost in engagement levels may be related to the nature of the Chinese service, which allows you to comment on updates as well as post them, while Twitter offers slightly different functionality with tweets, replies and retweets.
This article by Steven Millward originally appeared on Tech in Asia, a Burn Media publishing partner. Additional reporting by Memeburn.
