Felix Baumgartner and Red Bull Take Social Media by Storm

Last night the world was witness to a rare event which not only redefined the boundaries of adventure, but also took marketing to stratospheric levels. Literally.

In his death defying supersonic jump, 43-year old Felix Baumgartner broke several records:

• Highest jump for a human (from a height of 39 kilometers).
• First person to break the sound barrier outside of an airplane (1137 kmph)
• Longest distance covered in a free fall (36.5 kilometers)

So how did this event unfold on social media? Let's have a look, shall we?

YouTube

The Red Bull youtube channel was streaming the jump live. The entire episode lasted for almost 3 hours which included a 2.5 hour ascent to a height of 128k feet.

Even during the prolonged ascent, there were 3 million people watching it live. And according to YouTube reports, there were more than 8 million concurrent viewers of the livestream during the peak.

This a record in itself which broke the previous record held by the London Summer Olympics which had 500,000 concurrent viewers tuned in.

Twitter

Twitter was abuzz with tweets from the event as viewers went crazy tweeting using hashtags such #livejump, #stratos, #spacejump and even #felix.

According to Topsy analytics, following are the number of mentions the event received:

• #livejump: 495,536
• #stratos: 273,759
• #spacejump: 133,548
• #felix: 131,850

Now we all know it was not just an adventure feat, it was a marketing exercise as well by Red Bull. And with more than 260k tweets mentioning Red Bull, it was indeed a great achievement.

Not only that, the fake Felix Baumgartner twitter account got 100k followers within 2 hours. Though the account seems to be deleted now.

Facebook

As usual, Facebook users were behind Twitter when it comes to awareness. But the Facebook Page of Red Bull Stratos did a good job of covering the event. Though they could have done it in a better way with some live updates and a better storytelling.

But they did make up for it by this interesting update ;)

But going by the interactions happening on the page, the event has surely managed to create a huge stir on Facebook as well.

Featured image by Kansir