It has been almost a month since the most watched Academy Awards aired and the most retweeted photo was taken. But the self-portrait of Ellen Degeneres, with other Hollywood A-listers like Meryll Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and many others, which broke twitter for  20 minutes are still appearing around our social media newsfeeds.
Michael Fleischman, Twitter‚ head of media science, published the metrics of the event on Twitter‚ The reach and impact of Oscars 2014 Tweets, explaining the reach and impact of the event tweets and the record-breaking selfie.
From the start of the show, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time until Monday at 5 a.m., here’s what twitter media science found:
“There were 19.1 million Tweets sent about the Oscars.”
“Those Tweets were sent by more than 5 million people.”
“More than 37 million people viewed those Tweets across different Twitter platforms such as the website and twitter mobile.”
The tweets were also viewed more than 3.3 billion times between 5 p.m. ET on Sunday and 5 a.m. Monday morning. This was measured by the number of times those tweets were displayed to users. Furthermore, these tweets were embedded by journalists, bloggers and ordinary social media users on other websites reaching those who are not on twitter.
How Samsung Won an Oscar
With Samsung’s out-of-the-box thinking they were able to leverage this reach of the social media giant and accidentally create more impact than what they paid for. The Korean-based mobile company who spent more than $20 million in advertisements got more than they were expecting when Ellen Degeneres took the selfie using a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and encouraged the viewers to make it the most retweeted photo ever.
Even though many others believe that it was merely a marketing strategy of the company, Samsung claimed that they themselves did not expect that the product integration would lead to an incredible marketing stunt.
Below is an infographic from twitter depicting how the photo spread across the web during the show.
If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
The photo was:
“Seen by an audience across Twitter.com and Twitter‚Äôs mobile and desktop apps by 8.1 million people ‚Äî a total of 26 million times.”
“It was also embedded on 13,711 web pages. Those embedded Tweets were seen 6.8 million times by 5 a.m. ET on Monday.”
“Together, the two make for a combined impressions figure of 32.8 million for Ellen’s Tweet.”
While others would think that the promotional strategies of Samsung would stop with the selfie, Samsung announced on the Ellen Show the next day that they would donate $1 per retweet of the Oscar Selfie to Degeneres’ chosen charities.
Aside from implicitly asking the people to keep on retweeting the photo, the strategy also helped in projecting a charitable image for the company, making this strategy one for the books.
Currently, the Oscar selfie has more than 3.4 Million retweets.