Twitter released its annual look back at the year’s most popular tweets, biggest trends and most notable moments as seen through the lens of 140-character updates. There was a lot going on, from Hurricane Sandy to Whitney Houston, but the clear standout trend: We love to talk about things on TV.
Almost all of the year’s major conversations were about sports, politics or entertainment. Twitter went wild during the the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the presidential debates and the MTV Video Music Awards. It was the second screen where we went online to root for teams and politicians and musicians.
You could see this even more vividly reflected in the most retweeted moments of the year. Barack Obama had the most retweeted (810,000!) message with “Four more years.” But every one of the top tweets was related to politics, sports or entertainment.
This is the second-screen culture we keep hearing about, where we take to a phone or a tablet to talk about the things we’re seeing on TV. Even when it comes to Sandy’s destruction, or Houston’s self-destruction, when news hits we no longer just digest it; we go online to disseminate, dissect and discuss it. This isn’t a new behavior, of course. It’s the water cooler writ large, all across the planet, all at once. Except instead of taking place the day after an event, Twitter and Facebook and the like let us talk about events as they happen.
Which is exactly why politics and sports, and even natural disasters, lead to so many conversation. They are unscripted moments, happening in real time, with uncertain outcomes. They tend to be full of drama and human emotion. They elicit passionate takes, which themselves elicit passionate replies (and maybe even passionate retweets).
There’s a lot of talk about Twitter remaking itself into a media company. And Twitter clearly is trying to position itself as the place people go online to talk about current events — the Discover tab in its app was more or less made just for that.
But really, just as we gave it the retweet and the hashtag, we are the ones remaking Twitter. It may be able to point out things that are going on, but we’re the ones who make things happen. If Twitter is a media company now, it’s because we’ve made it that.
Our Favorite Tweets Highlight Our 'Second Screen' Culture, Twitter Survey Shows
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Our Favorite Tweets Highlight Our 'Second Screen' Culture, Twitter Survey Shows
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Our Favorite Tweets Highlight Our 'Second Screen' Culture, Twitter Survey Shows
