On Tuesday (Jan. 14), Twitter revealed how powerful of a force K-pop was on the social media platform in 2019. With over 6.1 billion tweets related to the music phenomena, engagement on what the site calls "#KpopTwitter" was up 15% last year from 2018.
Thailand was the country that tweeted the most about K-pop in 2019, followed by South Korea and Indonesia. The United States and the Philippines had the next most engagement with K-pop last year, while Brazil, Malaysia, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, France, Great Britain, India, and Turkey also saw heavy engagement with K-pop Twitter.
The most discussed K-pop accounts worldwide were BTS followed by EXO and GOT7, with Monsta X and BLACKPINK rounding out the top five. Accounts from Seventeen, NCT 127, and Tomorrow X Together got a lot of buzz, while EXO's Baekhyun and GOT7's BamBam had the top most-discussed accounts associated with individual K-pop stars.
To the surprise of no one, the golden maknae of BTS, aka Jungkook, was the star of 2019’s Golden Tweet, aka the most retweeted tweet of the year: his dancing to Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” from June 9 has over 1 million retweets and over 2.3 million likes as of Jan. 14.
BLACKPINK, SuperM, Tomorrow X Together, Stray Kids, WayV, Ateez, X1, ITZY, AB6IX, and (G)I-dle were named Twitter's fastest rising K-pop accounts worldwide of 2019.