Obama beats Bieber: President’s victory tweet becomes the most popular of all time within minutes of being sent

Within minutes of Barack Obama sending a tweet of thanks to his followers for their support in securing four more years in the White House it had become the most popular of all time.

President Obama's 'Four more years' tweet, which also features a picture of him embracing the First Lady, has quickly racked up more than 350,000 retweets and 100,000 votes as favorite tweets.
It has easily beaten the previous record for most popular tweet, which was ‘RIP Avalanna. i love you’ by Justin Bieber with 223,376 retweets.

 

This tweet has quickly racked up more than 350,000 retweets and 100,000 votes as favorite tweets

The previous most popular tweet was this message from @justinbieber

About 32 million tweets referencing the U.S. presidential election were sent on election day, with more than 23 million sent after the first polls closed. Activity peaked at 8:19 p.m. PT when the major TV networks declared Obama the president, generating 327,452 tweets per minute, Twitter said.
That surpassed the 85,273 tweets per minute that accompanied the announcement that Iowa's electoral votes had gone to Obama just seven minutes earlier.
At around 11.15pm ET, Obama’s campaign team tweeted, 'This happened because of you. Thank you.'

Within minutes President Obama sent another victory tweet: 'We’re all in this together. That’s how we campaigned, and that’s who we are. Thank you. -bo'.
The inclusion of -bo indicated a personal tweet from Obama himself and this message too quickly garnered 167,939 retweets within 30 minutes.
The picture of the President hugging his wife was also posted on Facebook, where it has already amassed more than a million likes and been shared more than 150,000 times.

Not long after the TV networks announced his victory, President Obama tweeted this message

Within minutes the President had sent another, more personal, message to his followers

This picture of the President and First Lady quickly attracted more than one million likes on Facebook

Twitter has created several special pages for the election, including this, which gives a snapshot of how the candidates are doing in terms of tweets

This election had already been dubbed the first 'twitter election', and the social networking firm had already seen a record breaking numbers of tweets sent throughout the campaign.
'The volume of conversation has exploded over the last several years,' said Adam Sharp of Twitter, who is the firm's Head of Government, News and Social Innovation.
'There are more tweets every two days than every tweet sent before the 2008 election.'
Sharp said even he had been surprised by the number of tweets surrounding the election.

KEY ACCOUNTS TO FOLLOW

Twitter is home to hundreds involved in the election.
Tweets can be tracked on a special interactive map
Here are its accounts picks to follow:
@BarackObama @MittRomney
@JoeBiden  @PaulRyanVP
@MichelleObama
@AnnDRomney
@Obama2012
@Gov 

'It has been very impressive to see how engaged voters are.
'In the presidential debates, for example, more than 10 million tweets were sent, with the biggest moment seeing 160k tweets per minute - double what we saw at the London Olympics when Usain Bolt was running.'
Twitter works closely with both candidate's teams.
'We work with both campaigns, and with each major news organization, and the team all come from Capitol Hill or journalism backgrounds.
'Our goal is to help them be successful - their voters are our users.'
Sharp is confident the service will stand up during the election.
'We've been fortunate with a lot of big events this year- the Olympics, conventions and debates.
'Our infrastructure is sound we believe - it's more about making sure we are ready to give news organizations details on the conversation, and what people are talking about.
Twitter has played an instrumental part in the election.
Each of the candidates has tweeted throughout, and Barack Obama went as far as setting up a special office in the heart of Silicon Valley to mastermind his online assault.
Earlier this year his campaign team opened the first Technology Field Office ever to be used in a political campaign in a warehouse building in San Francisco.
Around 200 Silicon Valley CEOs, engineers and entrepreneurs attended the sold out launch event, and many have been working to spread Obama's message through technology ever since.