Ray Lewis leads the social conversation surrounding Super Bowl 47
Super Bowl fever continues to sweep across social media as the 49ers and Ravens prepare to take to the field in New Orleans this Sunday. In 2011, the Super Bowl broke the record of tweets per second and during last year’s game, the number of tweets per second increased 200% over 2011. We anticipate a significant increase in total volume this year and it’s possible we’ll see another record set for tweets per second. What more specific things are we predicting? Let’s look at which players and brands you can expect to see receive the most buzz.
Who will be the most talked about person on the field? Ray Lewis
If the social media chatter continues at its current pace, the retiring Ray Lewis will be the most talked about man on the field come Super Bowl Sunday. Lewis is far and away the most mentioned name in the Super Bowl social conversation, he’s amassed over 188,000 mentions on social media over the past 14 days.
49ers QB Colin Kaepernick is a distant second about 4,000 mentions ahead of his Baltimore counterpart Joe Flacco. The other big narrative to keep an eye on Sunday is the “Harbowl”. The Brothers Harbaugh round out the top five most mentioned names over the past two weeks. Jim Harbaugh has a slight lead (about 2k mentions) over his brother John at the moment.
Prediction: Ray Lewis’ retirement trumps the battle of the Harbaughs and both QBs to lead the SBXLVII conversation.
Which Super Bowl Advertisers are mentioned most?
On Monday, we looked at which brands, among those with Super Bowl ads, were driving the most social media conversation up to that point. The leader at that point was Mercedes-Benz. Since Monday, however, another automaker has risen to the top of the most mentioned list. Volkswagen is the most mentioned brand this week. The automaker’s ad featuring a Caucasian man speaking with a Jamaican accent has caused a bit of a stir.
Here’s one last look at how the top 10 most mentioned brands stack up in terms of social media conversation, looking at this week only.
Tracking social media buzz surrounding Super Bowl ads offers a few tips surrounding social media monitoring.
- Monitor in real time. Let’s say that you bought three Super Bowl ads. One in each of the first, second, and fourth quarters. If you ran two different spots in the first and second quarters, wouldn’t you like some way to determine which was the better one so you could run that in the fourth quarter? That’s where monitoring in real time can help.
- Using social media for predictions helps inform smart business practices. If you determine the trends from years past and see how the trends are forming now, you can predict how to act. This could inform when/where to advertise, which social channels to use, and the types of content to create.
- Track more than just your brand name. In the case of Mercedes, we looked at mentions of Kate Upton as well as Mercedes (e.g. “Kate Upton’s Super Bowl Ad is awesome #sb47”). Your brand name won’t always be the center of the social conversation. Make sure you are listening for any distinct aspects of your campaign/ad to fully see how social media is responding.
- Looking to see just how intimidating social media monitoring can be without the right tools? If you’re responsible for the monitoring of social media for your brand, do you have proper tools ready to roll? If you haven’t gotten a chance to really test your social media monitoring plans, try keeping track of the conversation surrounding an event like the Super Bowl to see just how prepared you are.
The Marketing Cloud team (certainly Baltimore-born Ravens fan Andrew Gothelf) will be watching the game to see how our predictions play out and we’ll be recapping all the Super Bowl social media chatter on Monday. Until then, enjoy the game!
