There were some 1bn tweets posted every five days on Twitter in 2011, a year that saw the human population hit the 7bn mark, Facebook hit 800m subscribers and Twitter reach 100m active users.
In an interesting infographic outlining the year 2011 in tweets, social media monitoring agency Digimind illustrates how real-time coverage of events has shaped the way we consume news.
In May, the capture of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden created a record of 5,106 tweets per second.
But a much more light-hearted announcement generated a new record on 28 May with 8,868 tweets per second; the news of the pregnancy of the singer/actress Beyoncé.
However, a whole new level was reached when the 20,000 tweets per second mark was crossed in Japan, on 9 December, during the television broadcast of the famous cartoon by Hayao Miyazaki, Castle in the Sky: 25,088 tweets per second!
