EastEnders revelations trigger record Tweets

Thirty years since @BBCOne soap EastEnders (@bbceastenders) first came to our screens, Twitter came alive tonight with the culmination of the long-running ‘who killed Lucy Beale’ storyline. 

The hour-long special at 7.30pm - complete with live segments highlighted on screen with the #EELive hashtag - attracted 508,678 Tweets in the UK, which made it the most-Tweeted-about episode of a UK soap ever.

In the moment in that show when the killer was ‘revealed’, a massive 19,662 Tweets were sent in a single minute as viewers across the country reached for their phones to share in their surprise:

However, that peak in Tweets was eclipsed by an additional show at 9.25pm which, according to social analytics firm Kantar Media (@KMUKSocialTV), triggered a peak of 32,638 tweets per minute as the true killer was revealed:

The 9.25pm show attracted a massive 499,424 Tweets, taking the total number of EastEnders-related Tweets over the course of the evening to more than one million in a huge night for British TV:

With another episode planned for tomorrow and trends across the UK including #FreeDot, Bobby Beale, Jane and #killertwist, fans of the show can be sure that Twitter will be the place to come to share in the drama and celebrate 30 years of this much-loved soap.

Update 20/02/2015: We’ve corrected this blog post to reflect updated data points from @KMUKSocialTV, which have been adjusted overnight and now show the 7.30pm episode had slightly more Tweets about it than the 9.25pm episode.