A study by Brandwatch says that Twitter users used the #AppleEvent hashtag more than 217,000 times around Apple’s big product announcement event yesterday, and that the tweets came fastest when Microsoft took the stage during the event. The moment when the most #AppleEvent tweets appeared was when Microsoft’s VP of Office products Kirk Koenigsbauer took the stage to talk about how Microsoft Office products will work nicely on Apple’s giant new iPad Pro tablet.
Koenigsbauer demonstrated how the iPad, with the new Apple Pencil, can be used to create elements such as charts and graphs in Microsoft documents. Apple paid to make #AppleEvent a promoted trend on Twitter (it is still trending, organically now). The @Microsoft Twitter handle was among the most mentioned within tweets that used #AppleEvent, Brandwatch said. It was used 780 times and accumulated over 17 million impressions. The only two handles that were mentioned more were @AppStore and @Tim_Cook.
Much of the heat around Microsoft’s appearance had little to do with the products themselves. Microsoft has historically been the face of the PC world, the antithesis of everything Apple. To see a Microsoft guy onstage running a Microsoft app on an Apple device has some novelty value to be sure.