Twitter receives a royal boost

Graeme Parton +

While the traditional way in which the birth of the latest Royal was announced to the media on Monday added an expected touch of class, the classic easel couldn’t quite compete with the power of social media when it came to public engagement.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Twitter, in particular, was awash with frenzied celebrities and members of the public offering their messages of support and commenting on the proceedings.

According to Twitter, the pinnacle of international talk on the site came just before 8:40pm – around four hours after the birth – when the news had more than two million mentions on the microblogging site.

Users labelled their posts with a variety of hashtags, including #RoyalBaby, #RoyalBabyWatch and #RoyalBabyBoy – the first of which alone has been used more than 900,000 times since Monday morning when the Duchess of Cambridge was taken into hospital with Prince William.

While Twitter didn’t state how many Tweets per minute the baby had attracted from his home country, it is thought that that total didn’t quite match up to the previous record of 120,000, which was set just a few weeks ago by Andy Murray and his victory at Wimbledon.

As with the traditional media platforms, the intense online attention saw users across the world giving their congratulations and opinions. According to Twitter’s blog post, the news was biggest in the UK, France, Canada, Italy and, of course, the U.S.

While the activity has certainly cooled a little throughout the week, the spotlight is now on potential names for the baby, with the hashtag #RoyalBabyName becoming an extremely popular choice for those offering their own suggestions.

Twitter’s statistics show how people are automatically turning to social media sites to catch up on the latest news, and this is certainly something of which businesses should be taking advantage. By regularly posting industry-relevant, well-written news content, any firm should be able to maintain the interest of its target audience.