As the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Charlotte, North Carolina, last night the Democrats showed the Republicans they had the edge in social media.

More than three million Tweets, including #DNC2012 and related terms, were posted in the first day alone around the convention compared with four million Tweets sent throughout the three days of last week’s Republican National Convention (#RNC2012) in Tampa.

And last night’s star turn from First Lady Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) lit up Twitter and almost doubled the volume of tweets that Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) was able to achieve in Florida last week.

According to Twitter, Michelle Obama’s primetime speech peaked at 28,003 Tweets per minute (TPM).  Mitt Romney’s (@MittRomney) only managed to hit 14,289 peak.

One line alone in her speech, “we’ve got so much more to do”, that appealed to the future and for a second term for her husband Barack Obama hit 22,004 TPM.

The Obama team used the moment to tweet from the President’s account and share a family scene of Obama and his two daughters watching Michelle Obama as she delivered her speech.

The increased use of personal pics by the campaign teams on both sides, the Romney team tweeted family images last week, shows how they see using social media to deliver personal images, and private moments, helps brings them closer to votes.

The immediacy of the pic, essentially ‘here is Obama watching TV’, gives it a greater sense of authenticity.

Michelle’s biggest fans were watching from home: twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 5, 2012

The Obama family couch tweet was shared more than 20,000 times with
14,692 retweets and 6,210 favourites.

Last week the Obama team posted an amusing response to Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair interview with Obama” that also garnered a massive response. It was a nice put down.

The “this seat is taken” tweet went on to be shared 76,000 times with 54,524 retweets and 22,016 favourites.

You can see Michelle Obama’s speech on YouTube here.