You'd never guess what Singapore's most popular tweet of 2015 was

2015 has been a very memorable year for Singapore, with the events in the country over the past year resembling an emotional roller-coaster ride.

The joy of celebrating this young nation’s 50th birthday was tempered by the death of Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, earlier this year. And, beyond that was the 2015 general elections, which saw intense campaigning as well as a surprisingly comprehensive victory for the ruling PAP party.

However, while these events, as expected, drew a lot of chatter on Twitter, the most popular tweet of the year came from a most unlikely source.

The most retweeted Tweet this year, coined the ‘Golden Tweet,’ was a declaration of love by Twitter user @Fatynn, who tweeted a series of photos of her hand-made gift to her boyfriend, celebrating their special memories together.

This simple, yet heartfelt tweet was retweeted over 15,000 times, and viewed over one million times on Twitter.

Key moments in Singapore

Twitter recently summed up the events in Singapore that made a big splash in social media. Based on the times they saw a spike in tweets, the company drew out the things that Singaporeans and Singapore residents spoke about the most. These included:

Upon the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Twitter was flooded with the hashtag #RememberingLKY, and received 1.2million tweets of support for his family, people expressing their grief, as well as tweets that celebrated the founding father's life and achievements.

This was followed by the nation’s Golden Jubilee National Day Parade on 9 August, when the hashtags #SG50 and #NDP2015 trended. The National Day Parade celebrations around the city-state brought out the national spirit, resulting in over 230,000 tweets and setting a new record for the most number of tweets for a single-day event in Singapore.

The General Elections were held in September, and within that one week of campaigning – the shortest campaign period in the world – Singaporeans sent a total of 360,000 tweets sharing their views on the various candidates and parties. The hashtag that trended in that week was #GE2015.

In the later months of the year, the haze affected Singapore and its neighbouring countries thanks to the annual ‘slash and burn’ exercises at plantations in Indonesia.

Singapore laboured for three months under a smoky haze with around 250,000 Tweets that included everything from PSI levels to humourous images of the slowly disappearing skyline. Most used the hashtag #SGhaze.

Other events, like the Singapore Grand Prix, garnered close to one million tweets over race week, while the 2015 Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) finals saw over 460,000 tweets.