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If you're like us, you saw your Twitter feed blow up on Sunday night with tweets about dresses, acceptance speeches, and French swears as the Oscars were broadcast on ABC. But for all that tweeting, 84th Academy Awards were only third largest social media event of 2012, according to one research firm. Third, specifically, to the Super Bowl and Grammy Award. The Super Bowl is usually most watched TV event of year, so it being the second most tweeted is hardly surprising. But how exactly did the Grammys edge out both the Super Bowl and the Oscars in 2012?
The data above is from Bluefin Labs, a tech firm out of Cambridge, Mass. that measures how much viewers post on social networks during televised programming, including television events like sports games, political debates, and awards ceremonies. Its totals use publicly available posts, which according to Bluefin's Tom Thai is comprised of the vast majority of Twitter but only a small percentage of Facebook posts. Bluefin tabulated 3.8 million "social media comments" on Sunday night's Oscars broadcast, a healthy 293 percent increase from 2011, when the firm first started collecting data. But that total and year-to-year growth don't quite stack up to the two other big broadcasts. Bluefin counted a little more than 12 million comments for the Super Bowl, 6.8 times 2011's total. The Grammys had 13 million comments, which was an incredible 2,280 percent growth from last year's broadcast.