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Tweeps and the #SOTU

By Craig Johnson
updated 3:18 PM EST, Wed January 25, 2012
NEED TO KNOW
  • Social media site a-twitter with musings on Obama speech
  • Next-day polls no match for real-time analysis and jokes online

America watched President Barack Obama outline his agenda for the nation on Tuesday night, but the real action, like everything else these days, was on Twitter.

The powder-blue interfaced social site was in rare, high-powered form for the State of the Union Address. Want to know how the nation, especially the youth, feel about a national issue? No poll (and there are some already) or survey can match the real-time results of the social networking site.

The popular microblogging site put out an awesome graphic, posted on Politico among other sites, illustrating the sheer mass of tweets sent out about Tuesday night’s State of the Union Address. Some highlights: 766,681 tweets were sent over the hour that the president spoke. That's 8,052 a minute. (And of course, that's not counting the many times you'll retweet this story).

We all know the Republicans were all up in the heezy on Twitter, (According to the New York Times, Republican House members logged more than 157,000 tweets compared to roughly 62,000 from Dems) but the Democratic Machine, driven by the POTUS himself, fired off online messages with abandon.

Read more: SOTU: Obama vows to 'keep the promise alive'

On Tuesday night and into Wednesday, the speech drew a potpourri of responses, many of them whimsical, others wise and some just downright wicked. Of the more light-hearted sort was this gem from comedian Doug Benson:

Would it have killed Obama to thrown in an occasional "boo ya"? #SOTU

And Comedy Central comedian Stephen Colbert rocked Twitter with this one:

SOTU drinking game: One shot after each time Obama says something socialist. If you’re confused, it’s at the end of every sentence.

Not to be outdone, political satirist Andy Borowitz tweeted:

Obama's whole thing about bringing America back was totally ripped off from Justin Timberlake.#SOTU

Obama’s social media coup didn’t end there: Immediately after the SOTU, the White House’s Flickr account posted a photo of the president phoning the father of Jessica Buchanan, after her rescue by American forces from Somalian kidnappers. The picture had multiple retweets Wednesday.

Can you say, "#hashtag presidency"?

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