ABOVE: We sit down with the Managing Director of Twitter Canada, Kirstine Stewart, to find out what Canadians were talking about in 2013
TORONTO – Unless you were living under a rock in 2013, it will come as no surprise that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford generated a lot of buzz on social media this year.
But you may be surprised to hear that despite dominating late-night television shows rants, the Rob Ford crack scandal wasn’t the buzziest topic on Facebook.
Facebook Canada said that the Toronto Maple Leafs generated the most discussion on the social media network, followed by the Harlem Shake dance craze, ‘twerking,’ courtesy of Miley Cyrus and the Boston Marathon bombings.
Facebook Canada’s top 10 topics in 2013
- The Toronto Maple Leafs
- The Harlem Shake dance craze
- Miley Cyrus’s infamous twerk
- Boston Marathon bombings
- Toronto Mayor Rob Ford
- The Royal Baby – Prince George
- Justin Trudeau
- Lance Armstrong
- Pope Francis
- Chris Hadfield
Google Canada search terms of 2013
He didn’t dominate Facebook chatter, but Mayor Rob Ford certainly was the king of Google Canada search terms.
The team at Google dissected more than 40 billion search queries submitted in 2013, and Ford topped the search engine’s “trending list” – representing the search terms that stood out more compared to web history.
Google Canada’s top 10 trending list:
- Toronto Mayor Rob Ford
- Glee actor Cory Monteith
- Actor Paul Walker
- Murder victim Tim Bosma
- The Boston Marathon bombings
- Nelson Mandela
- The Royal Baby
- North Korea
- The Harlem Shake dance craze
- Lac-Megantic disaster
YouTube rewinds 2013
Social video giant YouTube look a look back at 2013 with its annual retrospective, this year appropriately titled “What does 2013 say?”
YouTube’s top trending video of 2013 was Norwegian band Ylvis’ “The Fox” – which has had more than 276 million views since September.
The song also inspired a couple of Rob Ford parodies, including one from Toronto radio host Dean Blundell and CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Check out the video gallery below, featuring YouTube’s top videos of 2013:
Twitter year in review
Twitter released its annual rundown of the year’s top tweets and hashtags with a new site that broke down the tweets by the month.
On January 16, a helicopter crashed in central London. Tweets surrounding “London chopper down” flooded the social network as emergency workers and witnesses tweeted out photos and updates.
In February, over 24 million tweets were sent about Super Bowl XLVIII using the hashtag #SB47.
Twitter says over 27 million tweets were sent in April after the Boston Marathon was devastated by bombings at the finish line, and a city-wide lockdown and manhunt for the suspects ensued. The hashtag #bostonstrong gained traction as people near and far showed their support for the city.
Some of the year’s most retweeted tweets included:
Glee star Lea Michele’s tweet following the death of co-star and partner Cory Monteith. “At its peak, her Tweet was shared 408,266 times as fans around the world mourned with her,” said Twitter.
On Nov. 30, actor Paul Walker died in a fiery car crash at the age of 40.
Walker and his friend Roger Rodas were killed when the Porsche GT they were in lost control and crashed, bursting into flames.
A tweet from Walker’s staff confirming the news was retweeted over 400,000 times.
With a file from The Canadian Press
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