Syfy’s #Sharknado Racks Up Impressive Tweets Per Minute

Was it the biggest thing to ever hit Twitter? Nope, as it turns out. But Sharknado — the TV movie from Syfy that has killer sharks raining down on Los Angeles out of tornadoes — was still a huge hit according to Twitter, drawing in tweets at about one-quarter of Super Bowl levels.

My feed certainly exploded, echoing what I was also hearing from others that I follow:

It seemed as if everyone I knew was watching the show. Sharknado seemed to be ubiquitous. Even Mia Farrow was tweeting about it:

Omg omg OMG #sharknado

— mia farrow (@MiaFarrow) July 12, 2013

Variety compiled a list of other celebrities gripped by Sharknado-mania.

And relax, Newark. Your mayor Cory Booker says there’s an action plan in place, in case Sharknado heads to the East Coast:

Understanding serious nature of this threat Nwk OEM put together an action plan. We’re prepared! RT @RobertYoungman: Thoughts on SharkNado?

— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) July 12, 2013

Did it trend? It did on Google:

But on Twitter, it didn’t make the US trend chart:

Twitter also shared these official stats:

To put this in perspective, at its peak, #sharknado was doing 5,032 tweets per minutes, which is about 84 tweets per second. That is nowhere near record levels, which tend to be at the 7,000 to 9,000 TPS level. But the official Twitter Data folks, when I checked with them, said that 5,000 TPM is very high:

@dannysullivan 5,000 TPM is pretty high. We don’t use TPS except to talk about Twitter as a whole. More here: https://t.co/qhGWoByzGO

— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) July 12, 2013

Indeed, from Twitter’s post about tweets per minute, the 2013 Super Bowl peaked around 22,000 TPM, just over 1/4 of the Sharknado level. The Super Bowl was more typically in the 4,000 to 8,000 TPM range. Sharknado was in the 1,000 to 2,000 level, again, about 1/4 of the Super Bowl. For a strange TV movie on a cable channel, I’ll count that as pretty impressive.

For those who missed the event, relax. Syfy is sure to repeat it forever. Here’s a trailer:

[youtube width=”560″ height=”315″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwsqFR5bh6Q[/youtube]

Here’s a quick clip of what the Sharknado looks like:

This is what #sharknado looks like https://t.co/jrlNj38VEW

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) July 12, 2013

And for those who missed it, Timothy Burke made an incredible animated GIF of the big conclusion. Here’s a single frame:

Now go see the whole thing here.