During the first down, there was quite a bit of activity around this event. Social media monitoring company, Sysomos, measured over 4.2m mentions of the Super Bowl, 99% of which came from Twitter.

Super Bowl tweet chart from Topsy

Comparing the numbers with metrics from Twitter’s official metrics provider, Topsy, it looks as if the National Football League did a pretty good job with hashtags as over 3.5m of the tweets came from the two most popular tags: #superbowl – 2.9m; and #SB47 – 593,000 tweets. In order to show the collective impact, the NFL should consolidate and go with one tag to make sure everyone is on the same page.

The famous Super Bowl halftime show

Oh, don’t think that the Twitterverse was going to wait for halftime to commence to begin talking about it. According to Sysomos, before the halftime show, there were about 288,000 tweets referring to all that was going to happen.

Beyonce mentions before halftime

And then the show came on.

As you can see below, there was a definite peak during the show and after the smoke cleared over 887,000 tweets took place between the hashtags #halftime, #BeyonceBowl and #Beyonce. Almost a million tweets and nobody had even put a ring on it yet. The Super Bowl champions that is… but I digress.

Actual halftime tweets

actual halftime tweets numerically

Then the lights went out

Shortly after a dynamic kickoff return to begin the second half, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome experienced a non-wardrobe malfunction and half of the lights went out. More than 79,000 tweets could be attributed to the hashtag #blackout and that’s not covering many of the allusions to the halftime show sucking all of the energy out of the building, jokes about the 49ers pulling the plug and references to Bane.

Suffice it to say, even without all of the numbers in about this particular moment in time, social media made things very entertaining. So did quick-witted community managers at Oreo and Tide:

Oreo Cookie blackout image

Tide Detergent blackout tweet image

Don’t forget about the commercials

It would just be wrong if we forgot about the commercials. During the Super Bowl a commercial break is not a time to go to the refrigerator.

Historically, these commercials are the biggest ones of the year for the brands who have the money. It’s its own extravaganza and the business people in the social world measure it with #brandbowl, #adbowl and #adweekbowl.

These three tags garnered 58,000 tweets on their own and I’m sure someone will soon have a list of all of the respective commercial hashtags. Someone needs to figure out the return on $4MM per 30 seconds, right?

So who won?

After all was said and done, the Ravens won the game. Wait, you didn’t think I only meant the actual game did you? We’re talking about the social web and the Ravens really won.

Team mentions from Sysomos

Looking above, you can see that The Ravens won on every platform measured by Sysomos.

I’d like to congratulate the Baltimore Ravens in their Super Bowl win and I’d also like to congratulate those who participated on the social web. Your thoughts are now documented in perpetuity and will be looked at, as a whole, for the next few days and on the interwebs, that’s a virtual eternity.