The Oscars Were More Twitter-y This Year Than Years Past

Twitter had a good night at the Oscars. How do we know? Because unlike last year, Twitter shared metrics about how much its user base tweeted throughout the event, and those metrics are bigger and better than the last time Twitter shared them, in 2014.

Twitter says that users sent 24.2 million tweets about the Oscars last night, up from 19.1 million tweets in 2014 (which pulled data from a significantly larger time window).

Perhaps more importantly, given the company’s effort to redefine how it measures its user base: Twitter claims those 24.2 million tweets generated 3.9 billion impressions both on and off Twitter in a 7.5-hour window. That’s the total number of times people saw tweets both on Twitter and on other platforms, like on TV or embedded on other sites.

That number was 3.7 billion last year and 3.3 billion in 2014 for a 48-hour window. So this year, Tweets generated more impressions in less time.

Twitter also set a new Oscars record for most tweets per minute when 440,000 people tweeted in the sixty seconds after Leo DiCaprio won the Oscar for best actor.

So more people were tweeting, and more people were reading those tweets, than in years past.

This is good news for Twitter, especially after it reported tweet totals were down during this year’s Super Bowl, another marquee event for the company earlier this month.

Why does any of this matter? Because Twitter’s user base has essentially stopped growing, and the company is trying to convince investors that it can continue to grow. The argument for some time now has been that Twitter can show tweets to people who aren’t active users — and eyeballs are what matter. Events like the Oscars, where Twitter’s efforts around real-time conversations come into play, are where it needs to improve to keep investors happy.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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