Royal wedding lights up U.S social networks

Nearly two-thirds of the volume of social media traffic pertaining to Britain's royal wedding has originated in the U.S., according to a Webtrends survey, while Britain is generating only 20%. And in total, the event is generating more social buzz than either the Japanese earthquake/nuclear disaster or the Egyptian uprising, a fact that U.S. TV networks are exploiting by interweaving their coverage with online and social elements.

Rumors that Americans don't care about the royal wedding are highly overrated.

And social media numbers tell the story.

Analysis of tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts by Webtrends, which gathers data on social media, shows that 65% of all social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past month. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%.

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Need more proof of how important a part social media is playing? Royal wedding social-network chatter has surpassed that for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the people's uprising in Egypt.

Also from Webtrends: 911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That's about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media tracked by the Web analytics company.

And the TV networks are taking advantage of the fact that social-media-loving Americans are all over the Internet.

They're using social media to engage readers and share minute-by-minute news, giving wedding followers countless social-media-drenched outlets to choose from, including the BBC's royal wedding Facebook page, CNN's Twitter posts from celebrities, the Today show's Facebook page and NBC's Twitter account @royalwedding.

And wedding watchers are responding in droves: ABCNews.com in a partnership with Twitter reported on its website that Twitter had counted 1.7 million total tweets by the time Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, had been pronounced husband and wife. That's about 13,000 tweets per minute.

USA TODAY reporters are sending Twitter updates on @lifelinelive, with highlights on @usatodaylife and @usatoday.

And a team of USA TODAY readers are tweeting from London using the hashtag #usatrw.

USA TODAY is also posting updates on two Facebook pages: USA TODAY and USA TODAY Life.