Twitter’s 10th Birthday: A Look Back at the Biggest Twitter Events of All Time

Twitter turned 10 today, meaning that we’ve been tweeting, favouriting/liking and hashtagging for one whole decade.

The social media tool has brought us political information, breaking news, some truly epic rants from Kanye West and pretty much every thought and feeling that ever ran through the minds of the One Direction members.

And while some critics are doubtful that Twitter will ever reach 15 or 20 years, here are some numbers and stats from the social media platform’s first decade:

– The first ever tweet was sent by the creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. The CEO tweeted it exactly ten years ago today on March 21, 2006, and since then it has racked up over 76k retweets and 54k favourites.

– In 2014 Ellen de Generes secured the most retweeted photo ever when she posted her star-studded Oscar 2014 pic that included Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt and, well just about everybody else. 3.3 million people retweeted the @TheEllenShow tweet, which Ellen said was to commemorate Meryl Streep’s record number of Oscar nominations. Reaching 779,295 in half an hour, it beat the previous record holder, U.S. President Obama’s “Four More Year’s’ reelection tweet in 2012.

– It wasn’t just a word of the year in 2015; Tears of Joy was also the most tweeted emoji of all time. People on Twitter laughed so hard they cried an impressive 14.5 billion times.

– When Germany beat Argentina 1-0 in the final of the Rio World Cup in 2014 it set the record for most Tweets Per Minute with 618,725.

– But Germany’s semi-final against Brazil set the record for the most discussed sports game on Twitter of all time after they beat the hosts by a staggering 7-1. There were 35.6 million tweets about the game (and quite a lot of memes).

– The most tweeted hashtag tradition is #FF, meaning ‘Follow Friday’ whereby users encourage others to follow people if they have done something notable or are new to Twitter. It had 539 million mentions. The #hashtag was created in 2007, when Chris Messina asked how they felt about using the pound sign for groups.

– Perhaps Twitter is big in Brazil, or maybe people just love tagging themselves there. With 638 million tags, Sao Paolo was the most geo-tagged city in the world. – The most far-out tweet came in 2009, when Mike Massimino posted the first tweet from space.

– Unlike Instagram, the Kardashians and Jenners are nowhere to be seen at the top of Twitter’s list of Most Followers.
1. Katy Perry@katyperry- 84,724,146
2. Justin Bieber@justinbieber – 77,404,775
3. Taylor Swift@taylorswift13 – 73,142,580
4. Barack Obama@BarackObama – 71,317,976 (Even though it wasn’t until May 2015 that the @POTUS got his very own account on Twitter.)

– Though he may be runner up for most followed, Justin Bieber is the most mentioned person on Twitter, with @justinbieber being mentioned 943 million times to date. That’s right, almost a billion mentions for the biebs.

– In just four hours and three minutes, Caitlyn Jenner became the fastest person on Twitter to reach 1 million followers. 

– In 2015, the fave button changed to a like – switching the star to a heart. And people may not have loved it but that didn’t stop them using it, as there are now 250 billion likes in total.

There you go. All of the big numbers from Twitter’s first ten years. Now, as for the next decade, who’s to say it’ll manage to stick around…

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