SuperBowl Social Media winners and losers

By: Danny Bishop - Creative Director, IMG Sports Technology Group 

The New York Giants took the lead in SuperBowl XLVI with less than a minute to play in America's most popular sporting broadcast ever.

The offices of IMG across the globe were glued to the telecast, with many taking a special interest in the NY Giants fortunes as winning Quarterback, Eli Manning, and winning head coach, Tom Coughlin are both represented by IMG, the global leader in Sports, Media and Entertainment.

But it wasn't just the massive TV viewership that broke records. In the final three minutes of the game Twitter reported an average of 10,000 tweets every second. That's almost 2 million tweets in the time it takes to listen to The Rolling Stones rip through "Honkey Tonk Woman".

When Ahmad Bradshaw sat down in the End Zone to give the NY Giants a lead they would not surrender Twitter went into overdrive. At 12,233 tweets per second it became the second highest spike in social sharing the micro-blogging site has ever seen.

Even Madonna's half time show sent fingers and thumbs to screens, keypads and keyboards. Averaging 8,000 tweets per second across the 5 minute act Madonna slips into third place on the "most tweets ever" ladder.

Twitter has fast become the constant companion of socially connected technology users across the globe. Launched in 2006 the site now boasts more than 460 million registered accounts.

The growth in Social Media continues to amaze many in the industry. Just one year ago the SuperBowl peaked at just over 4,000 tweets per second. This year the number was more than triple that figure.

And it wasn't just the athletes and musicians who got people involved. Superbowl ads have been aiming to get added exposure for their super expensive SuperBowl advertising slots via social media as well.

This year saw more advertisers push hashtags into their ads in an attempt to spark online chatter around their spots. Audi pushed #solongvampires, while Budweiser ran with #makeitplatinum and BestBuy launched #betterway. The traditional media still has a long way to go, however. Only 16% of all the ads screened during the game featured a social media call to action, while 57% included traditional web links.

The relatively low use of social media calls to action represent a significant misunderstanding of how SuperBowl viewers were likely to interact during the game. If your ad was the last in a break and your only call to action was a website the chances of someone visiting your site is probably very slim.

Viewers are much more likely to be talking with their social networks around these sorts of events. Aiming to pitch your call to action to make it as easy as possible for fans to converse about your brand, or complete your call to action is vital - especially when you know another ad competing for the viewer's attention is just moments away.

That's why brands need to focus more on facilitation conversations and gaining followers. The same holds true no matter if you're talking about the SuperBowl or a local cycling race. Once you've got them talking about you then you've got a chance to build a relationship and make them transactional. The advertisers during the SuperBowl understood part of this - only 1 of the ads screened included an offer. Chances are slim someone was going to think to themselves "I'll stop watching the SuperBowl and go to BestBuy.com to sign up!" Thankfully BestBuy also included a hashtag, so with some preplanning they will have recorded everyone who repeated the hashtag giving them a potentially huge new database of potential customers to target.

That brings us to the final point. Having a hashtag on twitter, or a Facebook page for your brand is great, but it's only a first step. Once you have managed to get your tag trending, or 100,000 likes, what then? How do you turn that traffic into customers? It's important that your efforts don't get wasted, and that you gather data. At IMG Sports Technology Group our systems have been designed from the ground up to provide useful information on your members, participants, shop and auction customers and purchasers of event tickets.

As Social Media becomes more and more important we are working to give our customers information on the fans they have on Social Media. In 2011 we launched the first shop system in Australia with full checkout functionality within Facebook. Each person using the shop is added to the client's database, providing information that you can access at any time. The roll out of socially integrated modules will continue for IMG STG customers in 2012, giving them unparalleled understanding of their fans.

Contact us for more information about how IMG STG can help your organisation make the most of Social Media.

IMG Sports Technology Group are part of IMG - the Global Leader in Sports Media and Entertainment. IMG Sports Technology Group are responsible for over 1.5M member records and more than $100M in online transactions annually for dozens of national sporting bodies and hundreds of grass roots sporting organisations.  IMG Sports Technology Group specialise in working with sports and member based organisations to provide online solutions to manage their engagement with participants, members and fans.