On Twitter, Oscar Comes Up Short Against Super Bowl

Sunday night’s Academy Awards came close to matching the Super Bowl’s overall activity level on Twitter. But, like the Pittsburgh Steelers or The Social Network, it came up just a bit short in the end.

Twitter says its users sent a total of 36.4 million tweets in a five-hour span Sunday beginning with the Oscars pre-show and continuing through the end of the show. The Super Bowl, over a similar five-hour period, saw 38.5 million tweets.

Twitter also says that activity spiked late in Sunday’s awards when the #oscars hashtag appeared on the TV broadcast; that prompted activity to surge to more than 7,000 tweets per minute. (see image above) But the Super Bowl, Twitter said a few weeks ago, reached more than 4,000 tweets per second late in the game — exponentially more activity than the Oscars’ peak.

Meanwhile, TweetReach and Mass Relevance did their own analysis of Twitter activity Sunday night and came up with numbers that are substantially different than Twitter’s. They say there were 388,717 users tweeting during the show and 1.27 million tweets. The difference seems to be that TweetReach is analyzing only tweets that included the #oscars hashtag, while Twitter is reporting a total number of tweets.

Here’s the complete infographic from TweetReach. You can find the larger version at the link above.