The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was always going to be a hugely public affair, and Clarence House were wise enough to embrace all forms of social media from the outset. The Clarence House Twitter Feed the first with the wedding details using Facebook, Google, YouTube and Flickr to spread the news, comments, videos and pictures of the big day. Global traffic for the Royal Wedding live stream peaked during the Buckingham Palace Balcony appearance for ‘the kiss’ with an incredible 5.3million page views per minute.

Over 24 hours, the event had 2.7 million social media mentions, with a 94% share of those mentions on Twitter and 270,000 mentions on Facebook. There are some great stats and facts to be seen in this great Royal Wedding Social Media infographic by WebTrends on Mashable.

Overall, according to the Daily Mail, the Royal Wedding became the 6th biggest online event in history, generating more media chatter than the Japanese Earthquake and the uprising in Egypt. Then, less than 48 hours after the newly minted Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had headed off on their honeymoon weekend, came the news about Obama Bin Laden – killed in Pakistan.

The news was first leaked on Twitter by Keith Urbahn, a former staffer under President George W Bush. But the story first started to unfold when an IT consultant, Sohaib Athar posted real-time Twitter complaints bout noisy helicopters hovering over his home town of Abbottabad in Pakistan. His tweets were to provide the background to the attack that killed Bin Laden and his fascinating timeline can be seen in full on TechCrunch. Within seconds the social web was buzzing with questions and speculation, a full 90 minutes before President Obama made his official address. That address was also streamed live by The White House and on Facebook, with aftermath and related social media chatter causing a bigger traffic spike that the Royal Wedding.

If anyone still needed convincing that social media was the most effective tool for spreading news, information and sentiment about what’s happening in the world. these two global historic events should have done the job.