While the battle for Scottish independents was fought and lost in the polling booths, the highlands and glens, it was also fought on Twitter.
At the time of writing the Yes side won 1,532,990 votes and the No side had 1,914,187, amounting to 45pc for Yes and 55pc for No.
In the last hour the proponent of Scottish independence Alex Salmond conceded defeat as 55pc of Scottish voters rejected the opportunity for independence. As such they will remain subjects of the United Kingdom rather than citizens of a brave new republic.
On social media the action was high octane. According to official Twitter data a total of more than 7 million Tweets have been sent about the referendum since the first televised debate on August 5, until the polls closed at 10pm last night.
One fifth (21pc) of those were sent in the the past 48 hours (1.5 million) as the debate reached fever pitch
Since 5 August there have been more than 1.55 million uses of the yes campaign hashtags on Twitter, 500,000 using the no campaign hashtags – a difference of more than a million mentions.
In the past 48 hours, there have been 378,000 mentions of the campaign hashtags for the ‘yes’ campaign, and 138,000 mentions of the ‘no’ hashtags.
The most-retweeted tweet on referendum day came from @Andy_Murray, who shared his stance with his 2.7 million followers. That Tweet was Retweeted more than 18,000 times:
Most Used Campaign Hashtags (since 5 August)
1. #IndyRef – 3.75m
2. #VoteYes – 1.1m
3. #Scotland – 439K
4. #ScotDecides – 272K
5. #BetterTogether – 224K
Scotland image via Shutterstock
