Japan and Korea lead New Year celebrations on Twitter with 33,388 tweets per second

There’s more evidence of Twitter’s popularity in Asia after Japan and Korea notched the highest volume of New Year’s Eve tweets, according to the US company. Tweets per second topped 33,388 when midnight struck in Tokyo and Seoul, that was higher than any other time during the celebrations.

The second highest peak came when midnight hit UTC -5, that’s New York/Bogota, when Twitter registered 13,336 tweets per second. That’s just ahead of Bangkok/Jakarta (UTC +7) on 11,675. The company also broke out figures for when the New Year arrived in UTC (London/Lisbon — 9,455) and UTC -8 (Los Angeles/Vancouver — 7,137).

The company hasn’t revealed the exact number of tweets that it saw over the crossing into 2013, other than to say (fairly obviously) that “millions of people” used the service to celebrate the coming of 2013. Its full figures are in the graphic below.

Twitter’s data is measured from across the service and not via location so, though tweets likely spike in place where midnight had come, tweets sent in each time zone could have come from anywhere across the world. That said, the data does serve as another indicator of the popularity of Twitter in Japan and Korea.

Twitter’s record volume is 327,000 tweets per minute when US President Barack Obama was re-elected, but a previous record came from Japan in December 2011 during the TV screening of the highly popular Anime Castle in the Sky in Japan. That high of 25,088 tweets per second smashed the previous record of “nearly 9,000” that followed the announcement of Beyonce’s pregnancy.

There’s plenty of other evidence for Twitter’s success in East Asia. Speaking last year, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo pledged to ramp up Twitter’s operations in Japan, while the company opened its first office in Korea last year. Japan was the first in Asia to get Twitter’s promoted products, while the country got a TV ratings service based on tweets months before a similar product was unveiled for the US market.

It’s worth noting that China’s Sina Weibo saw a record 729,571 messages per minute during the New Year, smashing its previous record by 52 percent.

Image via AFP/Getty Images