Schooling tops Singapore Twitter chart for 2016

Singapore’s first Olympic gold medallist Joseph Schooling was this year’s ‘golden moment’ on Twitter in the country, according to the company’s annual end of year round up.

More than 380,000 tweets blitzed the network in just three hours when the swimmer beat Michael Phelps in the 100m butterfly to win Singapore’s inaugural Olympic gold. This was quickly followed by memes, quotes and the hashtag #SchoolingWinsGold, which was picked up across the globe.

The ‘golden tweet’ of 2016 in Singapore was that of a cute cat, maintaining the trope of netizens being utterly obsessed with animals online. Sent from Singapore, the tweet went viral with almost 110,000 retweets.

So cute, it hurts. pic.twitter.com/O2YbHAV9Rf

— human error. (@blxcknicotine) February 3, 2016

Other big trends for Singaporeans on Twitter in 2016 include Pokémon Go, which was the biggest hashtag trend of 2016, the US presidential elections and of course, the Rio Olympics. Despite becoming a global phenomenon late in the year, the so-called ‘mannequin challenge’ also made it into the Singaporean top 10.

Singapore Airlines took the mantle of most followed account, closely followed by music artist Wil Tay. Continuing to demonstrate his immense popularity, prime minister Lee Hsien Loong was third, adding a whopping 195,000 followers in the past 12 months.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite all the fervour around his record-breaking swim, Schooling did not make the top 10 most followed accounts. Perhaps that will change depending on his performance in Tokyo in four years’ time.