After this year’s Super Bowl, there were a number of articles proclaiming that Twitter had “won” the event thanks to the general explosion in usage, as well as the prominent use of hashtags in many of the TV ads. But today Facebook is sharing some numbers of its own — and yes, it’s still an enormous source of conversation around big events.
The most recent data is around the Grammy Awards last night. Facebook says that there were a total of 43 million likes and comments made around Grammy-related content. That’s supposed to represent the reach that Facebook can offer: It’s not measuring how many posts mentioned the Grammys, but instead the ripple effects of those initial mentions as people’s friends and followers engaged with them. (If you want an incredibly detailed breakdown of what people were actually talking about, you can read more here. And while I don’t really see a way to directly compare the numbers, you can see some of Twitter’s Grammy statistics here.)
More interesting from an advertising perspective are the numbers from the Super Bowl. Twitter announced last week that half of the national ads included hashtags, and that those hashtags were mentioned 300,000 times on the day of the game.
Well, Facebook says it took that list of 26 hashtagged advertisers and found that they were mentioned in 2 million Facebook posts from game day. Were all of those mentions spurred by the Super Bowl? Maybe not, but the number was 12 times more than the day before, so it’s probably safe to assume that the ads made a big difference. And those posts, in turn, drove a total of 26 million comments and likes. (Just to be clear — the Super Bowl number is lower than the one from the Grammys because it’s limited to a specific group of brands.)
None of that changes the fact that the game served as an impressive demonstration of Twitter’s inroads with brands and advertisers. It does, however, suggest that the conversation hardly stopped there.