Social Super Bowl Performs Better This Year
This is a follow up to our previous Super Bowl social stats post.
Turns out that this year’s social media performance during the Super Bowl brought some major surprises. First and foremost, hash tags were used 57% times on Super Bowl ads; that’s 7% more than last year’s cypher, setting a new record. The 2014 “Social Super Bowl” scored 12,019,335 total mentions by February 2nd. Facebook became the social media platform with more posts pertaining to the Super Bowl with 650, 757 related comments, surpassing Twitter, which had only 583, 152 tweets according to this infograph released by Engagor and featured in Social Media Today.
If brands include a call-to-action, people will most likely participate in social media, as suggested by the Adobe Digital Index (ADI). Brands that actually included their social media buttons at the end of their commercial ads got more engagement on their profiles. GoDaddy.com ranked number one on customer’s engagement, with Wonderful Pistachios as a runner up.
One of the more interesting trends was releasing the actual Super Bowl ads on YouTube first, before the game. Some people would think this is not very practical, since the cost for ads in the Super Bowl are ridiculously high. Ironically, the brands that didn’t show them on Youtube before hand are now struggling on social media. According to this article, Chrysler’s ad debuted during the Super Bowl and now has a current amount of 4,565,777 YouTube likes, which may sound like a lot, but compared with Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” ad (which has a wonderful amount of 44,325,143 YouTube likes) it seemed like something went missing. That something was the power of the early release.
Another thing that called our attention was the performance of JC Penney during the Super Bowl. JC Penney was “tweeting with mittens” promoting its Team USA mittens for the Winter Olympic and they grabbed a great portion of the social pie during the Super Bowl. The interesting thing about this brand is that they did not advertise at the Super Bowl; as we suggested on our last post, “if you choose to humanize your voice and serve as an informant or critic about events at the game, you are potentially going to gain more followers”.
So, what can we take from the overall social media performance on the Super Bowl?
- Plan ahead: Prepare an #unique hashtag that you could use for the run ads or live feed of the game.
- Pre-release commercials: As risky as this might sound, if you can make your content viral prior to the official release, a lot of insiders will have the chance to comment before and increase the word of mouth.
- Have a Social Media team: The main key of engagement is actually answering to your fans comments. As this can represent a lot of constant work, two heads are better than one!
- Graphics perform better: In this case, audio-visuals have the game in the pocket again. Remember this is the graphic generation!
- Facebook and Twitter are kings of content but don’t leave it just there, YouTube and Instagram also ranked pretty well on #hashtag use and user engagement.
The main social nedia key is: knowing the trends and how to take advantage of them. The power of word of mouth might sound like a very basic concept, but truth is, it always works!