More Tweets Generated During Presidential Debate than Entire Super Bowl Week

For many Americans, the Presidential debate held last night in Denver created many conversations and solidified many opinions. Personally, I enjoy watching a good debate. President Obama and Mitt Romney are seasoned professionals in the art of speech. We are not going to argue, nay debate, the merits of each man's views and opinions. However, we did see a trend emerge past government and taxes.

Twitter users generated over 10 million tweets in 90 minutes. Let's view this through a different lense - Around 1900 tweets were generated every second.

From Twitter's offical blog :

As conversation on the Denver stage and on Twitter ranged from Medicare to Big Bird, there were more than 10 million Tweets this evening, making this first of the 2012 presidential debates the most tweeted-about event in U.S. politics.

The specific moments that generated the most discussion on Twitter were:

Moderator Jim Lehrer quips “Let’s not” when Governor Romney requests a topic
President Obama quips “I had 5 seconds” when Lehrer gives time limit
The discussion about Medicare and vouchers

The Social Media Lab at ExactTarget loves to track events and the Super Bowl happened to be in our backyard this year (Indianapolis. The Super Bowl is one of the most watched sporting events in the world. After tracking the tweets, we found around 5.5 to 6 million tweets were generated during the entire week before the Super Bowl (including the game).

The presendential debate doubled the amount of tweets in 90 minutes compared to an 8 day spread surrounding the Super Bowl.

There are plenty of ways to look at this growth: