The most tweeted moment from Apple’s Hey Siri event: When Microsoft took the stage

A study by Brandwatch says that Twitter users used the #AppleEvent hashtag more than 217,000 times around Apple’s big product announcement event yesterday, and that the tweets came fastest when Microsoft took the stage during the event.

The moment when the most #AppleEvent tweets appeared was when Microsoft’s VP of Office products Kirk Koenigsbauer took the stage to talk about how Microsoft Office products will work nicely on Apple’s giant new iPad Pro tablet.

That one moment generated close to 2,100 tweets, as illustrated below. (The bar graph is in Greenwich Mean Time.)

Koenigsbauer demonstrated how the iPad, with the new Apple Pencil, can be used to create elements such as charts and graphs in Microsoft documents.

Apple paid to make #AppleEvent a promoted trend on Twitter (it is still trending, organically now). The @Microsoft Twitter handle was among the most mentioned within tweets that used #AppleEvent, Brandwatch said. It was used 780 times and accumulated over 17 million impressions. The only two handles that were mentioned more were @AppStore and @Tim_Cook.

Much of the heat around Microsoft’s appearance had little to do with the products themselves. Microsoft has historically been the face of the PC world, the antithesis of everything Apple. To see a Microsoft guy onstage running a Microsoft app on an Apple device has some novelty value to be sure.

When analyzed by product name, Brandwatch said the tweet data shows that the new iPhone 6s was the star of the show Wednesday (at least in Twitter land), followed by the iPad Pro.

1. iPhone 6s (Plus) – 27K mentions

2. iPad Pro – 20K mentions

3. Apple TV – 17K mentions

4. Apple Pencil – 9K mentions

5. Apple Watch – 8K mentions

Brandwatch also tracked how many times the #AppleEvent hashtag was viewed. It garnered the most impressions of any hashtags related to the event, with over 4.4 billion, the firm said.

Brandwatch sells social media monitoring and analytics tools to enterprises.

“The Brandwatch analytics platform crawls millions of public forums, sites, and social networks using Boolean queries to pull particular, and relevant, data around a specific topic,” said Brandwatch’s Kellan Terry in response to questions about the firm’s research methodology.