These are officially the most popular tweets of 2020

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a year unlike anything that we have ever experienced before and although a lost has had to change some things have stayed the same.

Social media, for all of its downfalls and negative elements, of which there are plenty, has still allowed millions of people to stay connected with others and engage with what is going on around the globe. 

Twitter allowed people to learn of breaking stories, engage with positive movements for change,  laugh at the last viral meme and voice their opinions on issues concerning themselves, whether you agreed with them or not. 

As it is the end of the year, there is no better time to rundown the most liked and retweeted posts of the last 12 months and they are a varied bunch, with conflicting emotions to say the least. This information comes courtesy of Twitter itself.

The number one most retweeted tweet of the year was the announcement of Marvel actor Chadwick Boseman’s untimely death at the age of just 43 in August. At the time of writing, this has been shared more than 3 million times. It was also the most-liked tweet of the year with people hitting that heart icon 7.5 million times.  

This is also the most-liked tweet of all time, beat a post from Barack Obama from August 2017.

Speaking of Obama, his tribute to basketball star, Kobe Bryant who died in January, was the second most liked tweet of 2020 and the third most-liked tweet of all-time.

K-Pop megastars BTS, who are possibly the biggest musical act in the world right now, had quite a year with several of their tweets ending up in the most retweeted and most liked lists of the year.  According to Wikipedia, BTS now has 15 of the most top 30 most retweeted tweets of all time which is quite staggering really. 11 of those are from this year alone. The group does even better when it comes to liked tweets having 18 of the top 30 of all time. 

Elsewhere a tweet about a CNN headline that read ‘Two deadly viruses are killing Americans: Covid-19 and Racism’ was retweeted more than 814,000 times came third in the race for most shares. That was followed by an amusing tweet about quarantining and comedian Andy Milonakis’s tweet from 30th May about astronauts going into space.  This was also the third most-liked tweet of the year. 

Other stars on Twitter in 2020 were Home Alone actor Macaulay Culkin who shocked everyone by announcing he was now 40-years-old. This actually managed to get just as many likes (3.3 million) as Kamala Harris now-famous video of her talking to running mate Joe Biden after they had won the US election and Biden himself, thanking Americans for voting for him. 

Interestingly, when Twitter first published their data on this on 7th December they declared, “We only feature one Tweet per account and we don’t consider Tweets that offer reward in exchange for followers or engagement.”

While that would seem fair enough it is worth noting that a tweet posted on Christmas Day by influencer and entrepreneur Jimmy Donaldson promising to give away $10,000 to five people who retweeted his message is now the 16th most shared tweet of all-time with 1.1. million shares. Donaldson did the exact same stunt for his birthday in 2019 which resulted in one million retweets. 

Twitter notes that the top five most talked about people of the year on the website were Donald Trump, Joe Biden, George Floyd, Kobe Bryant and Barack Obama with the LA Lakers and Manchester United being the most discussed sports teams too.

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