It was the selfie seen round the world.
In a seemingly unscripted moment, the host of the 86th Academy Awards, Ellen DeGeneres, gathered some of the film industry’s biggest stars for a selfie that broke Twitter — and that left little doubt about which social media platform won the night.
See also: 21 Weirdest Things at the 2014 Oscars
Whether by design or by accident, Twitter was a constant presence throughout the nearly four-hour Academy Awards show. DeGeneres promised she would be tweeting throughout the night. That turned out to be only seven tweets, two of which were photos that most of us would have deleted before pressing "tweet." Even so, most garnered between 26,000 and 170,000 retweets — all respectable numbers for a celebrity hosting a show watched by 1 billion people.
Then, about halfway through the show, DeGeneres walked into the audience (again) and started chatting up 18-time Oscar nominee Meryl Streep.

Streep holds a record for Oscar nominations, and DeGeneres wanted to break a new record, too: the most retweeted photo.

Image: Tumblr, mishawinsexster
At first, it looked as if DeGeneres might try to accomplish this feat with just the two of them, but Streep insisted that her August Osage County costar and fellow nominee Julia Roberts get in the picture, too. Soon, DeGeneres was rounding up every celebrity in the general vicinity, including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Lupita Nyong’o, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Lawrence, Jared Leto (who appeared to run in from the other side of the auditorium) and Bradley Cooper.

Image: Tumblr, mishawinsexster
DeGeneres was using a Samsung Galaxy Note, the device provided by show sponsor Samsung. (The company ran a ton of commercials during the show.) It was her phone for on-camera social activity , but not the smartphone she used all night; other backstage photos were taken with her iPhone.
Some believe the photo was staged, but much of what happened in those few moments did not appear so, including when Bradley Cooper repeatedly offered to take the photo and DeGeneres insisted, “No, I’m doing it.”
Of course, as we all now know, Cooper ended up taking the selfie since he was in the right spot, and his arms reached long enough to get almost the whole group into the shot.
Plus, if everyone was in on the stunt ahead of time, would Jennifer Lawrence have suggested someone “drop a boob” to drive the maximum number of retweets? For the record, no one dropped a boob.
Twitter, which recently completed an Amplify deal with Oscar host network ABC, seems as amazed by the selfie as the rest of us.
"We were surprised and delighted to see Ellen’s use of Twitter during the broadcast of the program and the power of Twitter as a companion to TV is evident in the live reach we saw of that single Tweet,” said Twitter spokesperson Rachel Horwitz.
Hello from the Twitter Insights/Analytics team! If only @hey_sterling's arm was longer. #twitter pic.twitter.com/o27nRV9qgw
— Ian Chan (@chanian) March 3, 2014
At 10:10 p.m. ET, just four minutes after DeGeneres’ celeb-packed selfie hit Twitter, the service started faltering. Some of us — myself included — hit the “something’s wrong” Twitter screen. Twitter reported a brief service issue at almost the exact moment the super selfie went live. Fortunately, the service hiccup was short-lived.
The share counts for Degeneres's selfie skyrocketed immediately. 132,000 within a few minutes. After 10 minutes, it had 214,000 retweets. In that same brief period of time, my own tweet and TV screen capture of the moment was generating hundreds of retweets per minute.
At the time of writing, the celeb-a-palooza selfie had accrued almost 2.7 million retweets, a new Twitter record.
If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
That was surely lightning in a bottle. DeGeneres’s second selfie, with a none-too-happy Liza Minnelli (who had been cut out of the first selfie), collected just 47,000 retweets.
#Besties #Oscars2014 pic.twitter.com/gpg9PX5i2H
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
While we’re still awaiting the final “reach” numbers from Nielsen, Twitter is clearly basking in the afterglow of a strong social media-saturated evening that won the second screen. There were more than 14.7 million Oscar telecast-related tweets during the live show, according to the company.
DeGeneres’ super selfie helped propel her own Twitter account to new heights. According to Twitter, @TheEllenShow collected 47 times her typical number of new followers in a matter of hours.

Facebook was not mentioned once during the four hours, and while it’s unclear if this was by accident or design, it left one with the impression that the runaway second-screen winner was Twitter.
However, a quick look at the very same super selfie on Facebook belies that assumption.
Post by The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
With more than 1.8 million Likes, the Facebook post outstrips the tweet’s favorite count (1.5 million, at the time of writing). The Facebook post also collected 185,000 reshares and 41,000 comments, which is huge engagement. A typical Facebook post on DeGeneres' page garners between 16,000 and 50,000 Likes, and anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand comments. Shares usually run in the couple of thousands.
Despite these numbers, DeGeneres didn’t break any records on Facebook. The platform's most-Liked photo ever remains actor Vin Diesel's Paul Walker tribute (after the action star died in a car crash). It has more than 6.7 million Likes and 364,000 reshares.
Perceptions aside, Facebook appears to have run almost dead-even with Twitter when it comes to Oscars engagement. According to Facebook, the platform saw 11.3 million people engage in 25.4 million interactions about the show. That compares quite well to Twitter’s 14.7 million tweets.
However, reach isn't solely measured in Likes or tweets and for Twitter. Retweets represent a different, and perhaps even more important, facet of reach. According to Nielsen SocialGuide, 13.9 million people saw tweets about the Oscars, with a total of 1.04 billion Twitter TV impressions throughout the night. All those retweets may have even pulled more people from the general Twitter stream to Oscar-related tweets — and perhaps even back to their TV sets to watch the live show. Ad Age reported this telecast was the most-watched in a decade.
More evidence that Twitter won the evening.
The morning after Hollywood’s longest night, the selfie is still all anyone is talking about.
“I think that last night’s program was really embodied this idea that many people come to Twitter during live broadcasts to tweets about a program, but those tweets are seen by an even larger amount of people," Horwitz, the Twitter spokesperson, said. "So the power of Twitter as a public, widely distribute program was definitely on display last night."
DeGeneres’ stunt will likely encourage similar feats at other global media events like the Emmys, Golden Globes, the next Olympics and next year’s Oscars. However, that selfie was a one-time-only deal. Predicting what will take off and engineering record-breaking engagement is not science. It’s Hollywood magic.
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