WASHINGTON - Within an hour of her campaign's digital launch, the tweet Mrs Hillary Clinton posted to announce her second bid for the presidency had been viewed three million times.

That eye-popping number comes from Twitter's analytics team, which often briefs reporters on what kind of chatter has erupted on social media. There's more: From right before her 3pm Eastern time announcement, to right after 5 pm, there were more than 420,000 tweets mentioning Mrs Hillary Clinton. Half an hour after the announcement, there were 7,000 tweets about Mrs Clinton per minute.

The time lapse graphic by Twitter shows Mrs Clinton's announcement igniting a global conversation.

For comparison, it took 24 hours for Texas Senator Ted Cruz's announcement of his own presidential bid-which he made official on Twitter at midnight on March 22, Eastern time -to hit the three million view mark. Within three hours of her announcement, Mrs Clinton's launch video had hit nearly 250,000 views. Two weeks after he announced his bid, Mr Cruz's launch video has received less than half as many views.

Is this a comparison between apples and kumquats? Possibly. Mrs Clinton has been the 2016 Democratic frontrunner since roughly January 21, 2009; Mr Cruz is an insurgent candidate who leads in no primary state polling.

Yet the days of Republican tut-tutting that preceded today's video, all of it along the theme that Mrs Clinton was a staid insider whose entry in the race would launch 19 months of campaign boredom. That's not the case so far.