Yesterday’s major news story that Sir Alex Ferguson was set to retire at the end of the season sent Twitter into a frenzy, with over 1.75 million tweets being sent about the topic in just 24 hours. Ferguson is the Premier League’s longest standing manager with 26 years service at Manchester United, so news that he was due to step down was met with great sadness from United fans, as well as jubilation from opposition fans who see it as the almost certain demise of United’s dominance in England.<\/p>\n
According to data from Topsy, the official #ThankYouSirAlex<\/a> hashtag set up by the club (and plastered across their website) generated a very healthy 220,000 tweets in the last 24 hours with a plethora of journalists and players using it in their tribute tweets.<\/p>\n The second highest ranking hashtag was quite simply #fergie<\/a>, that continued to trend throughout the day and perhaps was being used by opposition fans who probably didn’t want to publicly thank their longest standing nemesis. Notably, it was the choice of long time Arsenal fans and super Twitter troll Piers Morgan. The #fergie hashtag generated just under 30,000 mentions.<\/p>\n A simple search for mentions of “Ferguson<\/a>” yesterday revealed an astonishing 1,442,772 mentions on Twitter yesterday alone – as the news broke via Twitter, it was full of tributes and speculation around who will be the next manager to take reign at Old Trafford.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n