Boston Marathon Bombing 2013's Most Tweeted Event

The pair of bombs that exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon killing three people and injuring more than 260 others prompted the largest surge of tweets for any event last year, Twitter reported this week. The first tweet was posted at 2:50 p.m. on April 15, shortly after the explosion. Tweets peaked 24 minutes later with 44,000 being posted per minute and, in the following five days, more than 27.8 million tweets referenced the event.

In the hours and days after the bombing, social media became an key way of spreading information particularly as the manhunt for the suspected culprits unfolded in Massachusetts. The bombing was the second most trended search on Google in the United States (behind actor Paul Walker,  who died in an auto accident last month) and the sixth globally. Facebook reported that the term "Boston Marathon" was the third most mentioned topic on the site in the United States and the eighth worldwide.