obamagaymarriage

When President Obama became the first sitting president to declare support for gay marriage in an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, the announcement sent Twitter into a tizzy. Politicians, celebrities and media personalities all used social media to react. Some expressed unqualified support, some criticized Obama for dragging his feet on the issue and others debated the announcement's actual significance (see gallery above).

But the news didn't just excite the Twittersphere — it also gave Obama a huge popularity boost on the network. Mashable contacted the social media analytics firm Topsy to see how reaction to Obama's interview played out on Twitter.

The chart below shows just how much of a positive sentiment infusion Obama got from his announcement, which came at just about noon Pacific Time. Topsy analyzes reaction to events according to a "sentiment score," and says a generally positive reception scores between 2 and 3 on the chart. Tuesday night, after voters in North Carolina passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, sentiment associated with his name sank below a score of -6, according to Topsy. But watch how it climbed to nearly 8 during Wednesday:

Shortly after Obama's statement of support aired on ABC, his official Twitter account posted this tweet:

"Same-sex couples should be able to get married."—President Obama — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 9, 2012

The message would be retweeted more than 30,000 times over the course of Wednesday afternoon. (This cool site shows how many retweets the message has gotten in total, with updates every minute.)

Twitter mentions of "Obama" spiked massively when his announcement aired as well. Check out this chart from Topsy, which breaks the buzz down nearly to the minute:

The term "North Carolina" was mentioned at a a peak of nearly 60,000 times in one hour after voters passed their gay marriage ban there on Tuesday night. But after Obama went public with an opposite stance on the issue on Wednesday, Twitter mentions of his name peaked to more than 192,000 mentions in an hour. Mitt Romney, who Obama will face in November's presidential election, also got a nice boost in mentions after he reiterated his position against gay marriage following Obama's announcement. This by-the-hour chart shows how Obama's mentions peaked through Tuesday night and into Wednesday afternoon, as well as how he compared to other hot Twitter topics during that time span:

And here's another graph from Twitter:

Did you follow Obama's support of gay marriage today? What role did Twitter play in how you learned and processed the news? Share with us in the comments.