Twitter is increasingly the global gathering place for communal experiences. During the past four days we’ve seen two radically different emotional experiences reverberate across Twitter: reactions to Osama Bin Laden’s death and the shared spectacle of a royal wedding.

Many news organizations —ABC News, CNN, BBC, ITV, Sky— amongst others —used the royal wedding as an opportunity to launch new Twitter integrations and to experiment with novel reporting approaches.

Here are some new best practices that have emerged:

• Tracking total Tweets and Tweets per minute about a major story has surfaced as a state-of-the-art news metric (@ABCRoyals’ Tweet tickers). A nod to MTV for first employing this for a pop culture event in their 2010 MTV VMA visualization.
• Hashtags as polls capture the audience’s opinion while also shaping and driving the conversation. (ABC News with #RoyalMess vs #RoyalSuccess and @SkyNews with #GoRoyals vs #NoRoyals.)
• For a shared story, using company-specific hashtags helps drive and identify your own audience’s tweets (#CNNTV, #BBCWedding).

Hashtags On-Air Integrations:

ABC News’ Tweet tracker (showing both total Tweets about the royal wedding as well as Tweets per minute) brought the energy of the massive shared conversation right into their commentary:

With the constant drumbeat of Tweets pouring in and their coverage of Trending Topics, ABC captured the global celebration far and wide beyond the crowds surrounding Buckingham Palace. ABC News also experimented with hashtag polls to extract opinion from their audience and give shape to the mass of Twitter activity, finding that 82% of their audience thought Kate’s dress was a #RoyalSuccess, and, despite the brevity of the (double) kiss, 96% gave it high marks:

CNN used a tailored hashtag, #CNNTV, to prompt tweets, and paid them off on-air with curated tweets from royal experts, CNN talent and their own audience. They timed the Tweets to the on-screen action to great effect, adding another constantly changing angle of commentary.

#CNNTV garnered over 15,000 Tweets and became a Trending Topic by consistently showing the hashtag on-air in the lead-up to Kate’s arrival. But it was the arrival of Prince William and Prince Harry at Westminster Abbey that sent CNN’s hashtag, #CNNTV through the roof with 252 Tweets per minute.

CNN also showed groups of Tweets in full-screen while transitioning out to advertisements, reminding their viewers that CNN’s coverage surrounded the experience.

BBC followed a similar path using #BBCWedding on-air and in Tweets (including from their own correspondents). Incorporating Tweets into the main program helped drive over 26,000 Tweets, while posting photos of key moments on Twitter generated almost a quarter of a million views by Friday evening.

Meanwhile, ITV read and showed Tweets on-air from a range of celebrities and viewers, while Sky held a hashtag poll the night before the wedding using #GoRoyals and #NoRoyals—finding out that the majority of their audience on the eve of the event were pro-royal.

Our work with TV partners like ABC, CNN, ITV, Sky and BBC shows that broadcast prompts like hashtags on-air immediately drive double to ten-fold increase in activity on Twitter. (See the Twitter TV highlights reel for examples of hashtags and handles on-air as well as live-tweeting.)

Hashtag Performance:

Overall, the hashtag #RoyalWedding dominated the conversation with over 2.2 million tweets. Mass Relevance tracked total royal wedding related Tweets for ABC News (e.g. Tweets including distinct royal wedding keywords, capturing Tweets not using hashtags) and has counted over 5.8 million in a little over four days, with a peak activity at 16,000 Tweets per minute between 5 and 6am ET on the day of the wedding.

Finally, a story-driving hashtag that caught our eye was the organic groundswell of #proudtobebritish. When William and Kate appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, the hashtag soared to 432 Tweets per minute—a fitting public display of emotion to crown a unique global experience.