Lakers’ championship beats World Cup on Twitter with record activity

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The Los Angeles Lakers produced championship ratings for Walt Disney Co.’s ABC with their Game 7 victory over the Boston Celtics, the most-watched NBA Finals game for the TV network. The Lakers worked the same magic on Twitter.

The popular website had already seen record activity (and down time as a result of the heavy usage) with the World Cup tournament in South Africa, with goal-scoring netting some of the highest tweets-per-second counts in the San Francisco company’s history (not to mention controversial referee calls).

The top three tweeted goals of the week: Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in its 1-0 victory with 2,940 tweets per second; Brazil scores its first goal against North Korea in a 2-1 June 14 victory with 2,928 tweets per second; and Mexico ties South Africa in a June 11 game with 2,704 tweets per second.

On an average day, Twitter gets about 750 tweets per second for a total of about 65 million a day.

But the Lakers set a Twitter record Thursday night, generating 3,085 tweets per second as the game ended.

-- Jessica Guynn