An election victory tweet from President Barack Obama – “Four more years” with a picture of him hugging his wife – was the most retweeted ever, but the US election was topped by the Olympics as the most tweeted event this year.

Obama’s tweet was retweeted more than 810,000 times, Twitter said as it published a list of the most tweeted events in 2012.

Twitter users were busiest during the final vote count for the presidential elections, sending 327,452 tweets per minute on election night on their way to a tally of 31 million election tweets for the day.

The 2012 Olympic Games in London had the most overall tweets of any event, with 150 million sent over the 16 days.

Usain Bolt’s golden win in the 200 metres topped 80,000 tweets per minute but he did not achieve the highest Olympic peak on Twitter. That was seen during the closing ceremony when 115,000 tweets per minute were sent as 1990s British pop band the Spice Girls performed.

Behind Obama was pop star Justin Beiber. His tweet – “RIP Avalanna. i love you” – sent when a six-year-old fan died from a rare form of brain cancer, was retweeted more than 220,000 times.

This was the third year running that the microblogging site published its top Twitter trends.

Superstorm Sandy, which slammed the densely populated US East Coast in late October attracted more than 20 million tweets between October 27 and November 1.

News of pop star Whitney Houston’s death in February generated more than 10 million tweets, peaking at 73,662 per minute.