While Super Bowl Sunday occurs in February, all of the action leading up to the big game takes place in January. With Twitter being a stage for pros and fans alike, #Superbowl began trending long before the coin toss.
In a sampling taken between January 1st to January 31st, the popularity of the hashtag grew leading up to the conference championships on January 22nd, with 87,507 engagements. Afterward, the use of #Superbowl sharply declined, rising again about a week before the game to 61,659 on January 31st.
Geographically speaking, the hashtag was used globally, with the greatest concentration of tweets coming from the U.S. Within the U.S., the hashtag was most popular in Texas where the final matchup was played.
Within the tweets sampled, most of the buzz centered around the Patriots and the halftime performer, Lady Gaga. Two seemingly random topics that came up in the buzz graph were “duke” and “enter”. The reason “duke” was popular was because there was a big game between Duke and UNC the following week, while “enter” came as the result of Super Bowl centered giveaway sweepstakes.
In the word cloud, all of the expected phrases, such as Patriots, Super Bowl, Falcons, Lady Gaga, win, and football, the largest word of them all was https. After looking into this, we realized that it came from people tweeting out links and, in most cases, mistakenly hashtagging them.
Shockingly, the top tweet using #Superbowl did not come from a source with sports affiliation, but instead came from a design and entertainment expert, Mark Addison, promoting his monthly newsletter. This edition of the publication centered around gameday drinks and snacks.
Jan issue of ENTERTAIN! goes out Tues. Get exclusive #SuperBowl #cocktail #recipe. Subscribers only! SIGN UP NOW: https://t.co/9Oe6psgU3p pic.twitter.com/ydR9uakLL1
— Mark Addison (@markaddison) January 20, 2017
After the big game, the hashtag’s life has not ended. Most of the content using #Superbowl are using the hashtag in order to latch on the popularity of the game and its historic outcome.
We Build Business Social Networks. https://t.co/YBSBdZfLZv #media #marketing #social #internet #forbes #wsj #bet #cnn #abc #superbowl #news pic.twitter.com/eMTSGqy20J
— Tweet Social News (@tweetsocialnews) February 27, 2017