It took Michael Jackson’s death to really show us the power of Social media today and how it is really affecting the way we get our information. We I first heard the news, it was via a tweet from some I did not know. At that time, I had access to a radio which was saying that he had been taken to hospital for observation. I then lost my radio access and had no TV access either so relied fully on Internet.

As the news came filtering out, I could see the growing swell of information pertaining to MJ’s death from Twitter and Facebook but the official sites such as CNN and ABC were still not saying that he had died, yet it was all over the social media circles as official.

I guess the thing about the instant notifications of social media is that there are so many people with so many ‘news’ connections that when a tweet or status update is posted, it often contains a link to the relevant site of where that information came from. So instead of me doing my usual search of the ‘official ‘ TV sites and News sites where ALL of them were not being updated as quickly as Twitter, I just needed to watch the twitter / Facebook time line and click on any of those links that I wanted to follow.

According to Tweespeed , There are approximately 400,000 to 800,000 tweets per hour on an average day. When news broke of Michael Jackson’s Death, this figure went to approx 1.2 million tweets per hour. This is staggering. Twitter are now saying that in the hours leading up to his death and the hours that followed, 30% of tweets contained the words Michael Jackson. Nearly all social media sites, including Twitter,  reported a large slow down in their server speed because of the Death.

Youtube and all of the video sharing networks have not been left out either.

Michael Jackson’s online popularity continues to soar: Mashable reported previously that 2.6 million songs  from Michael Jackson were downloaded this week;Apparently, no artist has downloaded more than 1 million songs in a week!

Videos of Thriller ( original or tribute variety) have been viewed almost 28 million times since his death.

Michael Jackson, it seems, is getting more popular by the day.

Below is one of the most popular videos on Youtube…now it is even more popular. A prison tribute to Michael Jackson