Chinese New Year Sets Microblog Message Milestone, But It’s Not the First Time

Sina Weibo mascots on a break

China’s Sina Weibo is making lots of headlines today having broken the unofficial tweets-per-second record with 32,312 messages during the first minute of Chinese New Year. As noted by our friends over at The Next Web, this surpasses the the messages-per-second mark for Twitter, which was 25,088 Tweets-per-second, set by Japanese users during an anime broadcast back in December.

But this isn’t the only year that Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo set a microblogging milestone, although it might be the first year that the West really paid attention. A little big of digging shows that the first second of the previous Chinese Year (Year of the Rabbit) clocked 12,374 messages, which at that time would have nearly doubled Twitter’s highest mark at that time, which was New Year in Japan with 6939 tweets-per-second.

Anyway you can check out our chart below (or click here to see source data), which shows some of the most Tweet-able moments of the past year or so. But as microblogging continues to grow in China and around the world, you can expect more records to be set in 2012.