November 2, 2012
Via Drew Olanoff of TechCrunch, Twitter has released some usage data during Hurricane Sandy. The company reports that from October 27 to November 1, over 20 million tweets were broadcast about the storm. During that stretch, mentions of the Red Cross were also up 30 times, and “donate blood” hit a 365-day peak. As Olanoff observes:
As these statistics show, people weren’t only tweeting, they were consuming information. People were using the search and discover functionality, along with trending topics, to make sure that they had all of the information they needed to navigate their way through everything that was going on on the East Coast. Mother Nature causes quite a scare when these things happen, and having a readily available set of information can calm those nerves.