By Laura Cox and Hugo Gye PUBLISHED: 01:19 EST, 12 December 2013 | UPDATED: 13:37 EST, 12 December 2013 One Direction fans have long been highly visible on Twitter, but the boyband's true dominance of the social networking site was confirmed today. Twitter announced that three of the year's top five tweets came from members of the British group, who between them have over 90million followers - much more than any other band or musician. However, the event which triggered the fastest trending alert on the site was altogether more sombre - the death of fiction writer Iain Banks had the biggest response from Twitter users in 2013.
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British boyband dominated list of the most popular Twitter messages
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Tweets about Niall's birthday, Zayn's engagement and Harry sleeping each received more than 300,000 retweets
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Iain Banks's death topped list of quickest trending UK news ahead of storm
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Other popular topics were Seamus Heaney, Ken Barlow and royal baby
The annual report breaks trends down into different subject headings including sport, politics, music and @placeholder news.