How big a deal was Batkid? Bigger than you might think.
The story of Miles, a 5-year-old with leukemia who wanted to be Batman and was assisted in this wish by pretty much all of San Francisco, touched many hearts on Friday. Now that the analysis is complete, we can see just how far and wide Miles' story went — and how fast a heartwarming event can go global via social media.
See also: Batkid Was Beautiful — Let's Keep It Going
There were 406,960 tweets on Friday featuring either the #batkid or the #SFBatkid hashtag. Those tweets didn't just come from a few power users, either. Some 377,048 unique Twitter users got in on the action, according to social-media analysts Marketwired. (em>Mashable's first story on Batkid alone was shared more than 125,000 times.)
Around 14% of the tweets came from outside the U.S.; Batkid was discussed in a total of 117 countries. Canada, the UK, Australia, Indonesia and Brazil offered the most international support. The most influential Twitter accounts to mention Batkid included @BarackObama, @Instagram, @Funnyordie, @SportsCenter and @PerezHilton, not to mention the Twitter account of Enrique Iglesias.
This particular tweet from Make-A-Wish was the most shared by far (even the White House retweeted it):
Here he comes!!!! #SFBatkid pic.twitter.com/PhF85F4Mw3
— Make-A-Wish Bay Area (@SFWish) November 15, 2013
Speaking of Make-A-Wish, all that attention crashed the organization's servers. During peak Batkid, the wish.org page featuring Miles saw 1,000 hits per second — a 1,400% increase over the charity's previous online traffic record.
Part of Batkid's success seems to be that his story was told in a compelling visual way, and not just by the organizers. San Francisco has one of the world's largest percentages of active smartphone users, which means that everywhere Miles went on Friday, he was surrounded by cameras.
There were 21,683 Instagram and Twitter photos posted with the #SFbatkid hashtag (the majority were on Instagram), according to social photo-tracking company Seen. The company estimates that the photos were viewed an astonishing 120,439,533 times.
Sentiment analysis — where tweets are examined by algorithm for their emotional content — is usually an imprecise measurement of how people react to an event. Not so much in this case. Just 4% of Batkid tweets were ranked "negative," according to Marketwired. Most of the negativity involved Twitter users wondering whether the day's events was a good use of San Francisco taxpayers' dollars.
How many people did Batkid reach overall? It's hard to judge, and we can't tell just from social media; you have to factor in newspaper sales and TV news viewers. That said, if you add up all the followers of everyone who tweeted about Batkid, you get 750 million, according to social-media agency Clever Girls Collective. If you add up all the followers of everyone who retweeted a Batkid tweet — among which there's a lot of overlap — you get 1.7 billion.
Regardless of the actual reach, that's a lot of love for one little boy in a Batman costume. Good job, world — now let's see what else you can do.

Apple CEO Tim Cook opens the event.
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, shows off the features of OS X Mavericks.
Federighi announced the new price for OS X Mavericks: free. It's available Tuesday.
Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, unveiled updates to the company's line of MacBooks.
Schiller outlines off the Mac Pro's features.
Schiller shows the Mac Pro in action.
A video captures how the Mac Pro is made.
Cook says 170 million iPads have been sold.
Schiller reveals the new iPad and its new name: iPad Air. It's thinner, lighter and has a smaller bezel.
The iPad Air will be available in white, black and space gray.
The chip inside the iPad Air is the same as the one in the iPhone 5S, the 64-bit A7.
The iPad 4 gets discontinued, but Apple is keeping the two-year-old iPad 2 in its lineup, starting at $399 for 16GB.
The iPad mini also gets a refresh, Schiller revealed.
The Retina iPad mini has a screen resolution of 2048 x 1536 and maintains the same form-factor as the original.
Here are Apple's new iPads and their pricing.
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the night before Apple's product launch took place here.
Images: Ramin Talaie, Getty Images News; Chris Taylor, Mashable