More than 760,000 tweets were sent during the State of the Union address

Twitter has announced that President Obama’s State of the Union address saw the microblogging service record more than three quarters of a million tweets relating to the speech.

According to the company, 766,681 tweets specifically mentioned “State of the Union” or its hashtag #SOTU while Obama took the stage. Other statistics revealed show that education, energy and jobs were the most discussed topics from the address, while 548 members of Congress joined in the conversation on Twitter.

The rate of tweets was highest during the President’s “spilled milk” joke which charted 14,131 tweets per minute. That’s impressive but it is some way behind Twitter’s best of 25,088 tweets per second, which occurred during the broadcast a popular Anime film in Japan, and even further behind China’s Sina Weibo which hit a record 32,312 per second during Chinese New Year this week..

The company pulled the data together in an interesting chart (click to enlarge) which maps the volume of tweets refering to the State of the Union against the time and topics that the President discussed.

This year’s State of the Union has been the most social ever. Alongside the hive of activity and discussion on Twitter, Facebook has seen politicians and members of the public sharing opinions en masse. The President himself was putting out key soundbites to his 12 million followers periodically, as his team kept the tweets flowing from his personal account, @BarackObama.

The President and his team have also used social media to boost communication with the public. The White House took to Twitter to answer questions before the address, while a Google+ ‘Hangout’ is planned for January 30.

Note: this image wasn’t taken from President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union