The 2014 Eurovision song contest dominated Twitter last Saturday night, generating more than 5.3 million tweets, according to the social network.
The traffic peaked at the victory of the crowned winner – Austrian, bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst.
Wurst’s performance of the song ‘Rise like a Phoenix’ triggered a storm of enthusiasm from viewers who flocked to Twitter to show their support, clocking up an average 47,136 tweets per minute, according to the micro-blogging site.
In total there were a 5,384, 678 tweets sent – smashing last year’s total of 3.76 million across Europe – which at the time made it the most tweeted-about TV show of 2013, excluding sport, according to Twitter.
The final count is in: 5.3M+ Tweets sent around the #Eurovision final. Peak TPM for @ConchitaWurst's victory. pic.twitter.com/O3s9nuNLfR
— Twitter UK (@TwitterUK) May 11, 2014
The event was particular popular among Twitter users in the UK, as demonstrated by this interactive Twitter map from CartoDB (above).
The animated map shows all the Tweets made between 6 pm and midnight around the world that mentioned ‘Eurovision’ and related words. Eurovision also seemed to occupy the minds of a number of Americans on Saturday night.