The winner of the Super Bowl gets their name on a trophy and enters into the record books as champions, the winner between Twitter and Facebook gets millions of dollars in ad revenue and a strong lead in being “the” social media platform for sports.
Even though the Patriots undeniably beat the Seahawks to win the game, the contest between Facebook and Twitter is a lot harder to judge. Both social media platforms claimed they were the most popular during the game, as did YouTube, and they all produce statistics to back up the competing claims.
“These are still two truly different platforms that have overlapping capabilities,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with Altimeter Group, a consulting firm.
Facebook claimed that 65 million people posted 265 million posts, comments and likes on its site during the match. This number was up 30 percent from last year when Facebook had 50 million people. According to Facebook, the most users were from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine and Massachusetts and the “top social moments” were about the Patriots win and Katy Perry’s halftime finale.
Twitter has claimed that its users posted more than 28.4 million tweets during the game using #SB49, though some may be from people who buy Twitter followers. That is up 14 percent from the 24.9 million tweets about Super Bowl XLVIII. Malcolm Butler’s pick of the final pass of the game yielded 395,000 tweets per minute. Commercial hashtags in use during the game also were counted with #bestbuds generating over 104 million tweets. Far outstripping all of the other brands.
Even though both social media sites claim a different metric, they are both competing for the same advertising dollars and users attention. The supply of both is not infinite and garnering the lion’s share is still the best way to generate success. Although it is hard to tell who was more successful, many large companies will be looking at these numbers in preparation for Super Bowl 50.
