Social media jumps to a whole new level

This week we’ve seen another example of how news can create ample amounts of engagement on social media. In the last 24 hours, Felix Baumgartner became the first man to break the sound barrier by jumping out of a capsule approximately 128,000 feet above the earth. This created much hype as videos and images of the event were shared on multiple social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. 

From the moment Felix went up into the air, millions of social media users logged onto YouTube to watch the live jump. This event became the first video to receive 8 million live viewers on YouTube. At the same time, social media users began to share this YouTube link on their Twitter and Facebook pages. After the event, Red Bull posted a picture of Baumgartner on their Facebook page which has since generated 517,711 likes, 15,128 comments and 68,993 shares. 

Yesterday, multiple news sites compared this event to when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. It was discussed on many traditional forms of media that the moon landing stopped a generation as it was broadcast on television and that perhaps social media doesn’t quite create the same enormity of events. I tend to disagree with this argument as social media users are able to simultaneously watch, comment and share videos / pictures of live events and then talk about them in face to face conversations. Let me know what you think!