‘This happened because of you. Thank you’: Obama excites crowd at speech

President Barack Obama told cheering supporters early Wednesday that "the best is yet to come" for the United States as he stormed to a second term by defeating the Republican Mitt Romney.

Speaking at his campaign headquarters in Chicago, Obama said he spoke to Romney and congratulated him on the campaign, and hoped to meet with the former Massachusetts governor to discuss ways to "move this country forward."

"In this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back," Obama said at the triumphant victory party.

"We know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come," Obama said, striving for inspirational heights rarely touched in a campaign where the prophet of hope of 2008 became a conventional, brawling politician.

Whoops and cheers across President Barack Obama’s winning states after the Democrat’s win was announced Tuesday.

As soon as the results were announced by news networks, Obama posted on his official account on microblogging site Twitter: “This happened because of you. Thank you,” signed with his initials "bo" to mark it as a personal message.

The post was quickly "retweeted" 88,000 times.

President Barack Obama won re-election to a second term in the White House on Tuesday, television networks projected, beating Republican challenger Mitt Romney after a long and bitter campaign.

Obama defeated Romney in a series of key swing states despite a weak economic recovery and persistent high unemployment as U.S. voters decided between two starkly different visions for the country.

Obama enters his second four-year term faced with a difficult task of tackling $1 trillion annual deficits, reducing a $16 trillion national debt, overhauling expensive social programs and dealing with a gridlocked U.S. Congress that looked likely to maintain the same partisan makeup.

Social media response

Election Day in the United States became the most tweeted about event in U.S. political history Tuesday with enthusiastic firing off 20 million poll-related tweets, the social network said.

Americans flocked to Twitter and other platforms all day in a massive social media burst, posting photographic proof they had cast their ballots, cheering their favorite candidates along and analyzing the latest polls.

“With 20 million tweets, Election Day just became the most tweeted about event in US political history,” Twitter announced on its official government and politics account @gov.

The number far surpassed the 10.3 million tweets sent during the first presidential debate last month -- an event the popular social network had at the time billed a record in U.S. political history.

In an indication of the importance of social networks in the presidential race, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney took to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit just hours ahead of polls closing to make last-ditch pushes for votes.

The campaigns have used social media extensively over the past few months to push people to vote and even try and beat the record 2008 turnout, when two-thirds of U.S. voters cast a ballot.