Did you know that the death of Whitney Houston made the late R&B star the most searched-for term on Google in 2012, ahead of Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 presidential election and The Hunger Games?

TBH (“to be honest”) was the most mentioned phrase on Facebook this year, and #nowplaying, #oomf (“one of my followers”) and #blessed were Twitter’s most-used hashtags.

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The 2012 U.S. Presidential Election was always going to be a huge deal for Twitter, both in how (as a technical entity) the bird coped with the massive influx of tweets, links and media, but also in how Twitter, the brand, will likely springboard from November 6 into an exponentially bigger and more vital organisation and platform that will now see rapid adoption and growth around the world.

All-told, Twitter coped pretty well. I did notice some API errors around midnight but they were fleeting, and it’s impressive that it all held up as robustly as it did: some 31 million tweets about the election were sent yesterday, with the conversation peaking at a heady 327,452 tweets per minute (TPM).

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Barack Obama has been re-elected as President of the United States of America and his victory tweet has quickly become the most-retweeted message in Twitter’s history.

Obama’s simple message – “Four more years.” – accompanied by a photograph of the President embracing his wife, has now been shared on Twitter more than half a million times.

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When you first join Twitter one of the rules that’s drummed into you from the very beginning is that status updates on the platform come with a limit of 140 characters.

This can seem restrictive at first, especially if you’re used to Facebook and its now unlimited character ceiling. But after a little while, and with practice, you learn to write good, strong and concise Twitter copy, always ensuring that you modify the words in your tweets to make sure they fit nicely within that 140-character maximum. You don’t resort to text speak, but you do know that you shouldn’t use a long word when a shorter one will work just as well.

But there’s a problem: you’re not getting many retweets. Why?

Answer: because you’re not leaving enough space.

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Twitter has unveiled the top 10 most retweeted tweets in its fourth installment of Twitter 2010, Year in Review. The number one spot goes to comedian extraordinaire Stephen Colbert for a single tweet about the Gulf Oil spill, and for this tweet Colbert got the first ever Golden Tweet Award, presented to him last night on the Colbert Report from Biz Stone himself. We’ve got the winning tweet, and the others who made it into the top ten, below.
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Over at the Twitter API announcements Google group, Twitter developer advocate Taylor Singletary has written about a beta project that their search team is working on that will rank results by popularity (as opposed to reverse-chronologically as they are now).

The Search team is working on a beta project that returns the most popular tweets for a query, rather than only the most recent tweets. This is a beta project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for users searching Twitter.

You can expect many improvements as we tune and tweak our algorithms, but we want to give everyone a heads up so we can go over the implications for those consuming the search API.

It’s unclear how exactly they are going to define what it is that classes a tweet as popular. People rarely click on individual tweets, so that metric isn’t going to work at all. My guess is it’s likely to be based heavily on retweets, perhaps held up against network size, which means that Justin Bieber is going to be your authority on everything.

For everybody’s sake, let’s hope they’re also working on an algorithm to counter that, too.

(Hat tip to Mashable.)

Back in March I wrote an article that explained how you needed to ensure that you left a certain amount of characters at the end of your tweets if you wanted to seriously improve your chances of being retweeted.

This is the mathematics:

Your Number = length of username + five characters

To give yourself the best possible chance of a retweet, you need to make sure you leave this many characters free.

In the article I noted that my own number was 12. When sharing links and content, I always ensure I leave a minimum of 12 characters at the end of each and every tweet. This is a great habit to adopt. Otherwise, those wanting to retweet you are forced to edit your submissions so that they can give the proper credit. Because f this extra work, many times, they simply won’t bother retweeting you at all.

Worse, your prose can be severely impacted – personally, I hate it when somebody trims down my carefully-worded remark into something that (shudder) looks like text speak. Everybody who reads that now thinks that I write in text speak. The horror, the horror…

As said, I’m always very careful to leave the necessary 12 characters. Recently, however, I started to notice that despite this effort, a few were still editing my prose to fit it all in. At first, I couldn’t understand why they felt the need to do this – after all, I’d made every attempt to ensure that my update could be easily retweeted.

Then it suddenly hit me – they weren’t using Twitter’s more common RT. They were using via.

What’s quite tragic about all of this is I use via, too. That’s pretty much all I use. I like via because it places the emphasis on the content first, and credits the original poster second. Content is king, but it’s also important that credit is given where due.

But it’s not all roses, as via adds an extra couple of characters to each retweet. Typically, via is credited within parentheses, like this:

Because of those parentheses (and the space before the first), I (@Sheamus) actually need to leave a heady 15 characters of blank space in my updates to give myself the best possible chance of a retweet.

Jack Schofield, using the example above, needs to leave 21.

Hence, the mathematics has changed.

Your Number = length of username + eight characters

This is the absolute minimum amount of space you should always leave at the end of each and every tweet. Particularly if you’re sharing linked content or an important message.

That’s assuming, of course, you actually want the world to see it.