The Church of England is celebrating the success of its #christmasmeans Twitter campaign that ran during the festive season.

Clergy and congregations across the Church's 12,500 parishes took to their tablets and smartphones throughout December to share what Christmas meant to them.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby (@abcjustin) led the way with a special Christmas message posted to his Instagram account.

Figures from the Church show that almost 7,500 tweets were sent using the hashtag with peak traffic occurring on the morning of Christmas Eve.

The campaign took on a global dimension when the hashtag was appropriated by Twitter users in America, Canada, Thailand, Singapore, South Africa and other countries to share the joy of Christmas.

Taken over a 48 hour period from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day these figures represent an average of 114 tweets per hour, or a tweet every 30 seconds.

The cumulative reach for the 7,305 tweets using the hashtags was 4.1 million twitter users.

Reverend Arun Arora (@RevArun), Director of Communications at the Archbishops' Council, said: "This is the second year the Church of England has adopted Twitter for a Christmas initiative and we are delighted with the results.

"Christmas is one of those times when the Church is at its best, proclaiming with joy and song the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. To see so many people communicating the joy of Christmas with a shared message of #Christmasmeans was a cause for rejoicing.

"This was a real team effort with archbishops and bishops, clergy and laity, on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, all joining in to proclaim the good news. As with the rest of society, there are many social media enthusiasts in our pews and it is each of them we have to thank for making this happen."