Twitter Prepares For Election Night Traffic
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) - Social networking sites are experiencing a big surge of activity this Election Day.
There are expected to be tens of thousands of tweets hitting San Francisco-based Twitter throughout the day on Tuesday.
"During the midday yesterday, election traffic was generating 23,000 mentions per hour," said industry analyst Peter Kafka with All Things Digital. "To give you a sense of scope, when the iPhone4 was rolled out last spring, it was generating 55,000 mentions per hour."
KCBS' Betsy Gebhart Reports:
Kafka points out that Election Day is a longer event than the iPhone4 debut, so there will be a bigger load for the site to handle.
But the big question is whether Twitter will be able to handle the surge in traffic.
"Twitter faces this now every time there's a big event. They dealt with this during the World Cup this summer," said Kafka. "They knew there was going to be a lot of traffic coming from the World Cup and they didn't do very well with it."
This is also the first election year that one old media company is advertising on Twitter.
The Washington Post bought the word "election" on the site, hoping to help promote its own stories in its traditional newspaper.
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