The Brit Awards are the most tweeted about show in the UK

After a 10-year high in ratings last year, the Brit Awards last night marked one of the lowest-rated broadcasts yet, with a mere 4.20m viewers. The show still broke one record though, and not the music kind. With a little help from Beyoncé and One Direction, just over 4,000,000 tweets were sent during the show, which doubled last years total and was just half a million less than the viewers who tuned in to watch it in real-time.

Source: gizbot.com

The music awards, despite attracting less viewers, overtook X Factor as the most tweeted about show in the UK. But if the show wasn't exciting enough to entice tons of viewers, what made it so tweetable?

Although the show had over 4 million tweets, only 2.17 million of them were posted on the site. The other 2 million were for the Brit Awards first ever social vote for Best British Video.

It's the first time a prize has been voted for during the live event, and made the show more interactive for viewers at home. Each nominated video was assigned a hashtag for voters. Sadly enough for the other nominees, One Direction won the award hands down.

That led teenage heart-throb Harry Styles to send out a loving tweet to fans...

Which led to over 150,000 retweets, and over 200,000 favourites, making it the most retweeted tweet of the night.

Beyoncé was the most tweeted about performer of the evening, after her live performance was announced just a few hours before the appearance.

Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys performed a rock'n'roll stunt, dropping the microphone on the stage during his speech. The rebellious act resulted in his name top-trending on Twitter.

What's more, the tweets hit a record peak of 78 thousand tweets per minute... that's 1,300 per second. The highest demographic of tweeters were female, which is not surprising, since a lot of them revolved around One Direction.