President Barack Obama declared yesterday “a good day for America,” following his announcement that Osama Bin Laden was killed during a U.S. operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Sunday night will be a moment that many people will remember for the rest of their lives. How did you hear the news? According to a poll on Mashable, more people hear the news via Twitter first than anywhere else. According to the Business Insider, Twitter just had its CNN moment – Twitter was faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there.
In fact, the news was first reported inadvertently and unknowingly by a Pakistani tweep annoyed by the buzz of helicopters overhead late Saturday night. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event),” tweeted IT consultant Sohaib Athar (aka ReallyVirtual). Athar did not realize it but he would go on to live-tweet the U.S. military raid on bin Laden’s compound.
Social media moves quickly. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley tweeted, “Will remember tonight as first time I was ahead of news cycle, via mobile, w/out TV or radio.”
We used Social Radar to run analysis around conversations online.
Osama Bin Laden chatter
Osama Bin Laden conversations are up 75,813% today versus yesterday. Compare this to the 2008 election of Obama where there was a 115% increase in conversation from Nov. 4th to Nov 5th.
Currently Bin Laden is being mentioned in ~5% (today) of ALL online conversations. Unprecedented. Since we created the Buzz Study blog three years ago, we have never seen a topic generating so much buzz online. As a point of comparison: the Royal Wedding, another hot topic that seemed to be on everybody’s mind, only comprised ~1% of all Internet conversations April on 29.
Content category distribution
Yesterday and today, 97% of Bin Laden mentions are occurring on Twitter. Bin Laden is currently being mentioned every .16 seconds.
Social media helps citizens form impromptu rally at Ground Zero
We compared Ground Zero, The White House, and Times Square and found that Ground Zero received the largest spike in conversations.
- Ground Zero conversations increased 4,043% today vs yesterday
- White House increased 1,277% today vs yesterday
- Times Square increased 692% today vs yesterday
Ground Zero conversations were interesting. Social Radar detected “Right Now” as a rising topic, showing up in about 7% of Ground Zero posts. Upon further analysis of the “Right Now” conversations we could see that people were talking about, “I’m at Ground Zero right now”, or they would tweet, “everyone needs to get to ground zero right now”.
Future of media
How did you hear Sunday’s news? How has social media changed the way you consume news? As TechCrunch reported, Twitter is not in and of itself a news source. Whoever is Tweeting is the source. But all it takes is one person to Tweet out news for it to spread faster than through any other medium. And that person doesn’t have to be a journalist.
Keith Urbahn, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff, was one of the first to break the news, and then we all watched CNN in anticipation for President Obama’s speech, confirming what we already knew, thanks to social media.
