This week, Google sent Twitter into a frenzy with their announcement of the creation of Alphabet, their new parent company.

The surprising revelation has been tweeted about 535,621 times since Monday. Here’s everything you need to know about what happened on Twitter when Google dropped the Alphabet bombshell.

Twitter explodes as the news breaks

If we look at the Twitter stream timeline below, we can see that it all started on the evening of Monday August 10th. (data retrieved in BST using the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform).

The number of tweets started to climb at 9.45 pm. However, the very first tweets about Alphabet were posted by NOD @NOD008 and Sol @seoderbynews at 9.42 pm. @seoderbynews’ tweet contained a link to the “G is for Google” post on Google’s official blog.

Top media accounts didn’t take long to follow suit. If we filter on users with 1 million followers or more, we can see that the first tweets to be sent by a high-audience account were from Bloomberg Business @business at 9.47 pm and @CNBC at 9.49 pm. This added visibility made the news spread faster.

The twitter storm escalated rapidly, peaking at 10.47 pm when it reached 1,417 TPM (tweets per minute).

Once the initial excitement was over, the overall number of tweets dropped again to an average of 15,000 tweets an hour for the whole of Tuesday.

A worldwide Twitter frenzy

Such a huge development in the tech industry was always going to attract international attention. Unsurprisingly, the United States generated the lion’s share of tweets about Alphabet at just under 30%, but other countries such as the UK, India and France also tweeted about the news.

The mystery of the @alphabet Twitter handle

You may have heard about the case of mistaken identity concerning the @alphabet Twitter handle. If we look at the most-retweeted tweets about Alphabet, the most popular post is from @alphabet. Not exactly surprising, until you discover that the account is owned by Chris Andrikanich from Cleveland, who has absolutely no affiliation with Google or Alphabet.

The unlucky coincidence meant that Mr. Andrikanich’s fairly average Twitter account has been flooded with mentions and retweets over the past two days after he posted the tweet below:

Well, that was an interesting way to end a Monday...

— Chris Andrikanich (@alphabet) August 10, 2015

If we use the Visbrain Focus feature to filter on this particular tweet, we can see that by 12 am this morning, the post had been already retweeted 6,872 times.

Alphabet’s top tweets

Unsurprisingly, Chris Andrikanich’s tweet was the most-retweeted by far for this time period, followed by tweets from Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi @narendramodi, and Director of Content at Code for America Dan Hon @hondanhon.

In spite of the funny mix-up, @alphabet wasn’t getting all of the attention. At the time this article was written, Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of Google, had been mentioned in 13,244 tweets congratulating him on his new job, making him the most-mentioned user after @google and @alphabet.

The most commonly shared links were to the Alphabet website, and the post on Google’s official blog announcing the creation of Alphabet. Both sites contain the official statement from Google co-founder Larry Page, explaining the decision to create Alphabet.

Alphabet was still trending this morning, and we can doubtless expect to see more developments from Google’s new parent company in the days and weeks to come, so keep an eye on your Twitter feeds.

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