During and after the Christchurch earthquake, New Zealanders used social media to share their experiences and get information. People affected with the calamity turned to social media to connect with friends and family days after last week's magnitude 7.1 earthquake. A nielsen survey says that more than 27,000 comments have been posted in six days on Web sites such as Twitter and Trade Me.

Due to the disaster, Twitter received the highest overall volume of posts to a public forum. The local New Zealand message board and forums got more than 8170 posts and there were more than 7206 comments related to the disaster.

New Zealand residents also uploaded photos and videos of the disaster's aftermath on YouTube, dailymotion.com, Vimeo and Flickr.

"The dramatic numbers in social media usage demonstrates the platform's ability to quickly collect and disseminate information. With one quick tweet you can reassure loved-ones that you're OK," said Tony Boyte, Nielsen's research director.