Digital Marketing Blog

Second Annual Super Bowl Social Brand Scoreboard Results

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A record number of people (111.3 million) watched this year’s Super Bowl on their television sets.  But in this age of social media, that does not begin to demonstrate its marketing impact. So while the NY Giants have been celebrating in New York City and the Meadowlands, we’ve been busy crunching numbers, to find out who the winners of Super Bowl XLVI really are.

This year, for our second annual Super Bowl Social Brand Scoreboard results we will be looking at key social media markers immediately after the Super Bowl and then a week later. Judging from last year’s results, we noticed that social media interest in Super Bowl commercials and their brands lasted longer than a day or so. This year, however, we wonder if that will be the case, what with all the pre-publicity and pre-releasing of the commercials days or in some cases weeks before the game? We’ll find out in a week.

Scoring Methodology

We used many different tools to help pull the data. These included Topsy, TweetVolume, Social Mention, Socialbakers and the various search results from Google and YouTube.

We also decided this year to assign specific football related points (touchdowns, extra points, field goals and safeties) to each of the categories so that we could determine the overall winners – those companies that did well in all aspects of social media reach. To the right you can see how we broke it down. Also at the end of each section we will give you the scoring leaders – just like a football game. 

So let the games begin. Here are the day-after results, our top tens and bottom tens, and how we did in terms of our predictions.

First Quarter: Facebook 

For Facebook we looked at two key markers – total number of new fans/likes and percentage of growth.  One of the things that we know about social media is that if you establish a solid social media marketing program, it will grow almost in spite of itself.  So, the companies that started with the biggest Facebook reach tended to also get the largest number of new fans/likes.

Our predictions compared to actual results:  We got three out of five correct. The surprises were the History Channel and H&M.  We have to ask, is there a connection between tattoos and social media?

When it came to percentage growth,  BudLight Platinum was the big winner. This is in part because the brand started with a very small amount of fans before the Super Bowl, thus the big percentage increase.

We did not fare so well in our predictions here.  We got two out of five correct (Doritos and Kia), with the biggest surprise coming rom MetLife and TaxACT. Who would have though that insurance and taxes could create such a surge in fan activity on Facebook.

End of First Quarter Score:  Doritos 10, Disney Pictures and History Channel tied with 8

Second Quarter: Twitter

Twitter is chatter central in social media. And if you don’t think that Super Bowl commercials create chatter, talk to our friends at Bluefin Labs. They showed that within 45 minutes of airing the H&M commercial there were 109 thousand social media comments about David Beckham. 

Our numbers showed that social chatter leads to followers. The big Twitter winner was H&M, adding a whopping 83,000+ followers.

Relative to our pre-game predictions, we picked only one winner, Coca-Cola.  Seems like the movie studios did not do as well this year as they did last.

In terms of percentage growth of followers H&M and Chevrolet were the big winners. And as for our predictions, we came up with blanks. What's interesting is that last year, the E*Trade babies and GoDaddy babes saw the greatest increase in Twitter followers. This year the babies are in the bottom ten and GoDaddy didn’t make the top ten. As we said last week, America might have grown tired of these talking babies.

Followers are one thing on Twitter. Mentions are another.  We predicted Coca-Cola as one of the top five. Had only we known about Beckham’s tattoos.

End of Second Quarter Score:  Coca-Cola 24, H&M 21, and History Channel 17

Third Quarter: Social Sentiment, Passion and Reach 

The online service Social Mention gives us a statistical view of the qualitative nature of the social media conversations that are going on at any given time. Let’s start finding out how well the top brands are reaching their consumers.

We have to say we were surprised that M&M’s and Mrs. Brown had the highest reach (we did not make a prediction in the category). 

But reach does not translate into passion and sentiment, which play an even bigger role in social media.  

What this shows, if nothing else, is that Americans are passionate about their cars. We predicted Lexus and Hyundai would be in the top five. 

The hope is that when people are talking about you they have nice rather than bad things to say. Sentiment is evaluated in terms of a ratio between positive and negative comments. On this one we got two out of five right (Best Buy and VW). We did not see Hulu Plus getting such good chatter.

End of Third Quarter Score: Coca-Cola 25, H&M 22, History Channel 19, and Chevrolet 12 

Fourth Quarter – YouTube 

The big question before the Super Bowl was whether Volkswagen could do it again and have the most watched video following the game. At first glance, 48 hours after the fact, it looks like they did it again. If one can say anything about this year’s batch of commercials, 2012 is the year of the car. If it weren’t for Pepsi, the entire top ten would be car commercials – a good omen for car sales. And as for our predictions we got three out of five right (VW, Chrysler, Chevrolet).

In terms of likes, cars dominated again, with the VW Beetle getting the most. The only non-automotive brand in the top 10 was Mars’ M&Ms.

Final Score

It was a tight game, with History Channel, H&M and last year's winner Coca-Cola coming close to winning. However, they were not strong enough for the onlsaught of Chevrolet's commercials, making Chevrolet the winning social brand for this year's Super Bowl Social Brand Scoreboard. 

Final Score: Chevrolet 27 - Coca-Cola 25

We are now busy putting the final touches to the complete report that should be available for all to read by tomorrow at the latest.