Twitter Scores Touchdowns in the Social Media Game

This year, the Super Bowl was the most watched TV show in history, with 111.3 million viewers. However, the social network data makes you question how many of those viewers were actually watching for the football game.

According to a study done by Networked Insights, almost three-fourths of the conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook on Sunday had nothing to do with the game itself. Forty-two percent of the tweets were about commercials, while 32 percent were about Madonna and the halftime show. Surprisingly, only two percent of the total tweets had to do with the Giants' victory.

Although the majority of the talk on Twitter and other similar websites was about celebrities, brands, and individual players, rather than the football game itself, the Super Bowl was still successful in attracting an incredible amount of publicity through social media.

Tweets including the hashtag #superbowl numbered around 1.6 million. This is the same amount of tweets as are normally posted in a single day. This drastic increase in Twitter activity led the social media outlet to experience two record-breaking moments during the game - once during the halftime performance and once at the end of the game. Furthermore, Twitter averaged an unbelievable 10,000 tweets per second during the game.

The amount of traffic Twitter received during the Super Bowl may directly relate to the way marketers reach out to consumers in the future. While Super Bowl commercials will always be influential in the advertising world, more companies may look to social media websites, such as Twitter, for a relatively cheap and effective way to reach their target markets. The statistics showing how huge the population of people using Twitter during the game sparked interest in a possible new way to advertise. It is predicted that five years from now, brands could spend up to $10 million on promoted tweets during the Super Bowl.