#EcoSOTU included in 4.6 million Twitter impressions

Best line of #SOTU so far: "We've subsidized oil companies for 100 years. That's long enough!" Straight outta @350 #EcoSOTU

— bcmerchant (@bcmerchant) January 25, 2012

As was expected by many and predicted by some, President Obama's State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress last night contained a considerable amount of references to energy and the environment. But even though we predicted clean energy would play a role in the speech and that juggling support for clean energy and fossil fuels would prove difficult to pull off for President Obama—and difficult to swallow for environmentalists—no one predicted energy would play as big a role as it ultimately did in the speech. And because the energy themes were front and center, the #EcoSOTU Twitter chat (which we first organized in 2010) was buzzing all night.

After running the numbers and cross-checking on several statistics platforms, the results are in, and they are pretty spectacular.

Well, by any metric, that was the most successful #ecoSOTU chat yet. You all totally rocked it! Chat recap coming tomorrow.

— ecopolitology (@ecopolitology) January 25, 2012

According to a report generated by HashTracking.com late Tuesday night, the #ecoSOTU hashtag was used in 1,083 tweets, consisting of 428 original tweets, 625 retweets and 30 @mentions. All this tweeting and retweeting reached an impressive total audience of 1,071,937 followers and generated an astounding 4,693,637 impressions.

Granted, these numbers are inexact and tabulating reach on Twitter is always a bit nebulous because it is doubtful that every twitter user counted was presented for every tweet published. Nonetheless, the aggregate results are striking. A few of the highlights are below.

Stay tuned for another recap of the #EcoSOTU chat later today when we'll link the various energy and environment components of President Obama's State of the Union to popular, insightful and/or pithy corresponding tweets.