Social media has changed perspective of watching the Super Bowl

Long gone are the days of tuning in to the Super Bowl to actually watch the game.

But who can blame the masses when the average amount of game action in the more than three-hour contest will be about 11 minutes, if a study some years ago by the “Wall Street Journal” holds true.

One can only watch so many commercials and consume so much beer and queso.

Social media, tailor-made for NFL football, has moved in to fill the void. And both John Doe and America’s brand names are taking advantage of the additional audience on social media forums.

Super Bowl LI is Sunday in Houston with New England facing Atlanta at NRG Stadium.

According to Nielsen Social, 16.9 million Tweets were sent by 3.8 million unique authors about Super Bowl 50 during the game a year ago. Included within this total Twitter activity for the TV event, 4.6 million tweets were sent by 1.4 unique authors about the TV ads. Others were broadcasting their favorite party dips, some even about the game.

However, the most tweeted minute?

At 7:44 p.m. CST, 162,000 Tweets were sent out, a minute after the halftime show. Over the entire broadcast, an average of 52,000 tweets were sent each minute.

The hastag is clearly trending.

“Let’s just say viewers were more interested in the entertainment,” said Nelson Granados, an analyst of digital trends in media and entertainment, writing a piece for “Forbes” in the aftermath of last year’s game. “An analysis of the most popular platforms suggests that it’s likely that you tweeted or posted about Lady Gaga or Beyonce, rather than the game itself.

Twitter reported 3.9 million halftime tweets, with Beyonce’s performance drawing one-third all of tweets (1.3 million), followed by Coldplay (774,000) and Bruno Mars (341,000).”

It’s also through the Twitter lens of the Super Bowl that networks can better understand their audience engagement and advertisers can further boost their brands. And brand management, at least as far as how the brand is administered during the Super Bowl, has been changed by Twitter.

The most popular brand on Twitter during last year’s game was Esurance and its #EsuranceSweepstakes campaign that involved giving away $1 million through Twitter during the Super Bowl.

What game?

Esurance’s hashtag campaign generated more than 1.6 million Twitter mentions during the game, according to Nielsen Social. By Monday morning, the sweepstakes had produced 1.5 billion impressions.

Doritos was next with more than 238,500 mentions, its ad featuring a baby jumping out of a mother’s womb to grab a chip a Twitter attention-getter.

Esurance’s focus was almost exclusively on Twitter, according to “Forbes”, which received a behind-the- scenes look at the insurance giant’s social media “command center.” The company ran two TV commercials to promote the sweepstakes.

In all, 16 prizes of $50,000 each were given away during the game, and one of $250,000 afterward.

And you can be sure that whoever won was tweeting away about their good fortune rather than Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos title.

This story was originally published February 3, 2017 at 9:15 AM with the headline "Social media has changed perspective of watching the Super Bowl."