Super Bowl XLVI Breaks Social Media Records

NBC

Madonna's halftime show generated major conversation in social media.

Ad Age's editorial partner Bluefin Labs, our Cambridge, Mass.-based social-TV analytics company, spent last night monitoring social commentary about Super Bowl commercials. This morning the Bluefin data team is busy crunching the numbers. We've also posted a top 10 list of the spots that blew up the biggest, but here's a quick big-picture look at social media and the Super Bowl:

1. Bluefin Labs has so far tracked more than 12.2 million social-media comments during and after Super Bowl XLVI, primarily on Twitter and Facebook. That's a 578% increase over the total Bluefin tracked last year (1.8 million).

2. Twitter, via its official @twitter account, said the final three minutes of the Super Bowl helped push total tweet volume up to an average of 10,000 tweets per second.

3. We have a new social-TV high-water mark. "Last night's Super Bowl is the biggest social-TV event we've ever recorded -- by a wide margin," Bluefin's Tom Thai tells me. "It surpassed the previous record of 3.1 million social-media comments, held by the MTV Video Music Awards last August."

4. Madonna's halftime show alone generated more than 862,000 social-media comments; by comparison, Bluefin recorded 966,000 social-media comments for the 2011 Academy Awards. "If the halftime show were its own standalone televised event," Thai said, "it would rank fourth in terms of all-time social-TV events for entertainment. It would trail only the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, the 2011 American Music Awards and the 2011 Academy Awards."

5. Bluefin Labs tracked more than 985,000 social-media comments specifically related to just Super Bowl commercials -- topping the total for the entire telecast of the 2011 Academy Awards.

Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco. You can follow Bluefin Labs on Twitter @bluefinlabs.