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US President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney shake hands following their first debate at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, Oct. 3. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
Last night we stayed late to watch the first US Presidential Debate and draw analytics from the Twitter firehose. Here are a few of our findings:
During the 90-minute debate, there were 10.4 million tweets mentioning Mitt Romney, Barack Obama or the debate. Twitter says this is the most tweets ever for a US political event
During the debate, there were 29,677 tweets specifically mentioning Obama and "win OR winner, while Romney picked up 47,141.
Twitter activity was highest between 9:48 and 9:58 pm EDT, peaking at 9:53, during a discussion about health insurance and regulation. The second largest peak was at 9:28 pm EDT, just after Romney suggested cutting funding to PBS despite the fact that he loves Big Bird.
Peak mentions of Romney occurred at 9:53 pm EDT during the health insurance discussion. Peak mentions of Obama came at 10:01 pm EDT during a discussion about Obamacare and Romney’s healthcare record in Massachusetts.
Keep an eye on the PeopleBrowsr Blog for more details about the election or visit our partner iCharts, which is using our data to produce insightful infographics in real time.
