Weibo Beats Twitter With 119 Million London Olympics Opening Ceremony Tweets

China’s liveliest Twitter-esque site, Sina Weibo, saw an Olympian 119 million ‘tweets’ about the London Olympics opening ceremony. The figure comes from Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) in an infographic in a post on one of its official accounts (see it here). That extraordinary amount of chatter dwarfs the 9.66 million tweets that Twitter said it counted up during the opening ceremony.

Sina Weibo has over 300 million registered users, which is fewer than the half billion who have signed up to Twitter. Nonetheless, Weibo users seemed to have proved to be chattier – perhaps aided by extra features like comments, and the extra space given to retweets that makes it a lot easier to propagate popular tweets. Of all those Olympics-related tweets, 59 percent were tweeted out by men.

Since Sina Weibo does have a number of overseas users – including over two million in Hong Kong – there was quite a bit of activity on it globally. Chinese users were unsurprisingly the most vocal, followed by a not insignificant 2.4 million Weibo posts from out of the UK, a fraction ahead of the number from the US:

As for specific highlights, there were 5.5 million mentions made on Weibo of the spectacular, Middle Earth-inspired Olympics cauldron, and 230,000 posts about Queen Elizabeth, who looked somewhat baffled and bothered by some of the playful opening ceremony antics. Oh, and there was that superb skit in which it was made to look like she and James Bond parachuted in:

As for Sina’s other services, the web portal boasts that it saw a peak of 49.35 million viewers of its licensed Olympics video stream.