What Did We Learn From The Super Bowl On Social?

In part two of their review, Cutting Edge Sport curators LiveWire Sport take a deeper look at the numbers behind Super Bowl 50.

On Monday we provided a snap reaction to the social media coverage of this year’s Super Bowl, looking at the big plays made by different platforms, teams and brands.

Now the numbers are in and the dust has settled. Twitter announced 4.3bn impressions of 27m Tweets about #SB50, and around 60m people joined the Super Bowl conversation on Facebook with 200m posts, comments and likes.

Twitter total audience: 4.3B views of #SB50 Tweets on & off Twitter, based on 27m Tweets (inc. pre/post game) pic.twitter.com/ZZnGvHgwJH

— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) February 9, 2016

Compare that to CBS’s TV broadcast of the game in the US that scored an estimated average of 111.9m viewers in the US.

With help from Spredfast data insights, we analyse what else we can learn about online behaviour around this year’s event – and what makes the Super Bowl unique in the world of sport and entertainment.

FOOTBALL IS THE WINNER

The Champions League final is the jewel in the crown of European football – or soccer – and its closest equivalent of a global annual sporting occasion to rival the NFL’s Super Bowl.

But when it comes to comparing the social conversations around the two events there is only one winner.

We measured the two events across a 24-hour period and found the use of #SB50 and #SuperBowl outstripped that of #UCL and #UCLFinal by nearly four times, with 7.8m Tweets to 2m.

The combined Twitter following of last year’s Champions League finalists is 19.3m (not counting a further 12 official accounts in localised languages), while @ChampionsLeague currently stands at just over 10.7m; Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers lay claim to just under 3m combined followers, and @NFL is the second most followed sports league on Twitter with 16m.

The big difference comes from outside the world of sport: of the top 20 most retweeted tweets mentioning the Super Bowl, 13 came from the insurance brand Esurance, with one victory post from Denver Broncos and three tweets from @NFL. The top tweets came from Betty White (1.2m followers) and Coldplay (16.4m).

Around last year’s Champions League final, 75% of the top 20 tweets by retweets came from Champions League or Barcelona, in addition to two giveaways from @worldsoccershop and one tweet each from Juventus, Gerard Pique and ESPN.

While they may be of similar stature on a global sporting level, the social data points to how far ahead the Super Bowl still stands as an opportunity for brands and personalities to engage with a bigger audience.

BRANDS BUILD THE BUZZ – TOGETHER

With the incentive for US consumers to win $250K by retweeting the #EsuranceSweepstakes hashtag, insurance company Esurance topped the list of brands driving conversation on Twitter. It gained four times as many mentions as Pepsi, the official sponsor of this year’s half-time show with its own custom emoji and Promoted Moment.

Budweiser also made it into our top five, with a late surge owing to Peyton Manning’s apparently unsolicited televised plug for the brand boosting the conversation around its #GiveADamn campaign.

This year we also observed an increased trend of brands interacting with each other on social media.  Doritos jumped in with a smart play on the classic Pokemon tagline, while Pepsi were the most talkative brand with tweets to Esurance, Skittles, Pokemon, Doritos and Papa John’s.

.@pepsi Wow, great HT Show. Winning $50K might be the only thing that could make it better. #EsuranceSweepstakes #SB50

— Esurance (@esurance) February 8, 2016

.@Pokemon Gotta crunch ’em all. Happy 20th Anniversary. #Doritos #Pokemon #SB50 pic.twitter.com/SKJVadSlPI

— Doritos (@Doritos) February 8, 2016

INSTAGRAM USERS GET TAG HAPPY

The @Broncos not only finished victorious on the night, they also proved the most popular Instagram account of the night, being tagged in 5,530 posts across the day of the game out of the 460K posts which mentioned #SB50, #SuperBowl or #SuperBowl50.

#Broncos appeared in 77K – or 16.7% – of posts in the Super Bowl hashtag conversation on Instagram, more than #Panthers (12.3%), #NFL (10.2%), or #Beyonce, who featured in 23,471 posts (5.1%).

Real Madrid also joined the Super Bowl party with their 26.2m followers on Instagram; their snapshot of the Levi’s Stadium tagging in both teams and attracting engagement of more than half a million likes.

 

A photo posted by Real Madrid C.F. (@realmadrid) on Feb 7, 2016 at 5:45pm PST

SHOWBIZ DOMINATES ON FACEBOOK

We measured the overall Super Bowl conversation on Facebook and found the glitz and glamour surrounding the game to lead top content by engagement.

Of the 10 most-liked public posts on Facebook, no less than four came from Coldplay, with one each from David Beckham, Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Australia’s Sunrise Breakfast Show.

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Denver Broncos – who with 4.3m likes have a Facebook following of just over a tenth of Coldplay’s – make up the 10 with two posts of their own. And when the game ended with the score at 10-24, Broncos were ready with a graphic to mark the moment they #BeatThePanthers – racking up over 236K shares.

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