Victory message and photo breaks Twitter record

A second term and a Twitter record — with much to celebrate, a picture of an intimate embrace with his wife Michelle has become US President Barack Obama’s most popular tweet ever with over half a million retweets and counting.

Just moments after his dream of a second term was realised, the president shared the celebratory tweet, accompanied by the words ‘Four more years’, with his 22.5m followers, leading to speculation it could be the most shared tweet in the history of Twitter.

Prior to this, Obama sent out words of thanks via the social networking site to those who voted for him, in what had to have been one of the first things he did on realising the election’s outcome.