Kenny Dalglish sacking generates 3k tweets per minute on Twitter

Twitter exploded yesterday at the news of Kenny Dalglish’s sacking by Liverpool FC. The Liverpool stream on FootyTwits was flooded with football fans commenting the news. Although FootyTwits was not able to record the “incident” at the moment it happened, about half an hour after the news was made official, there were still a stunning 3,000 tweets per minute on the Liverpool stream.

Twitter has increasingly become the first destination for football fans to read and write comments regarding matches and incidents. Recently, there were articles on how the Manchester derby generated 1 million tweets or how the Barcelona – Chelsea Champions League semi-final reached a peak of 13,684 tweets per second. Another article written by Digital-Football.com, indicated that there are nearly 29 million users following football clubs on Twitter.

We can expect even greater volumes of tweets in the coming days and months. The Champions League final on Saturday will, undoubtedly, break another Twitter record. And the next record-breaker after that could be during the Euro 2012 tournament.

Without a doubt, Twitter has become a primary channel for football conversation and combined with the “breaking news” nature of micro-blogging, has to be viewed as a serious communication channel. Dalglish was the Premier League’s only manager on Twitter and his sacking now means that Celtic manager, Neil Lennon, is the only manager in charge of a European team to be active on the micro-blogging platform.

The excellent FootyTwits site has launched an Android app for Euro 2012, where you can track mentions of your national team on Twitter. Keep an eye out over the next few weeks for more stats.