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Sunday 9 October 2011

Steve Jobs’ Death Garners 2.5 Million Tweets, Over 13,000 Blog Posts

Steve Jobs was the king of technology and he is responsible for advancements that completely revolutionized the way we interact with technology and live our day-to-day lives. It’s not surprising that users would take to technology to mourn after the news of his passing – particularly through Twitter, where news spreads faster than reporters can report on it.


Sysomos gathered data about just how much people were tweeting, blogging and posting about Jobs’ death and the numbers are enormous. At 8:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday there were 249,042 tweets sent out that mentioned the Apple founder after the news of his passing went public. That number rose to a shocking 2.5 million in 12 hours. By 8:30 a.m. EDT on Thursday, feeds were inundated with tweets about the former CEO.

It’s not just Twitter that was buzzing with the sad news; pretty much every social media outlet was affected. By 9:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday night, there were 1,905 blog posts, 3,836 online news articles, 1,483 message board posts and more than 579,400 tweets. The numbers only rose from there. Along with the 2.5 million tweets that piled up overnight, by 8:30 a.m. EDT on Thursday morning there were 13,284 blog posts, 25,704 message board posts and 30,905 news mentions.

Keywords surrounding Jobs’ death ranged from sadness to praise and mentions of his innovations. On Wednesday night when the news of the iPhone 4S launch was still circling around various blogs and news sources, words like Apple, iPhone, smartphone, Macintosh and iPod were still some of the most prevalent terms. It was clear that it was too early for the news to completely impact all fronts, though like usual, Twitter was ahead of the game.




By 9:30 a.m. EDT on Thursday morning, keywords regarding technology were amassed with words like condolence, saddened and cancer. It’s unsurprising that the focus would shift towards sadness, respect and facts about his death rather than technology as the news spread further and further through different parts of the world.

If you weren’t convinced that Jobs’ impact on technology extended globally, a heat chart outlines the areas of the world that buzzed with social media mentions of the visionary. As you can see, while the U.S. has the largest volume of mentions, there are mentions spread out across the globe.

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