Twitter’s Big Game

According to Nielsen, 12% of US Super Bowl viewers multitasked by browsing the Web during the game last year. The top site visited was Facebook, and nearly one-third of multitaskers visited some kind of member community—for more than 16 minutes on average. Just as multitaskers post status updates and tweets about their favorite shows, when Super Bowl time comes they chatter about their favorite ads.

What created the most buzz in this year’s Super Bowl? Twitter employee Kevin Weil posted a fascinating minute-by-minute breakdown yesterday of Twitter updates mentioning brands during the game. It’s definitely worth a look.

The first @DoritosUSA ad at marker C caused the largest per-minute volume of commercial-related tweets — for the minute following the ad, related tweets were 19% of all tweets we saw, eclipsing even the chatter around the Super Bowl itself for a brief period. The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google’s Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more.

The tens of thousands of tweets at stake during the Super Bowl can mean an earned-media coup for brands—if viewers find the creative worth talking about. The new eMarketer Insight Brief, “What You Need to Know About Earned Media,” explains how good content is critical to getting consumers to spread marketers’ messages for them. Making ads easily shareable helps too—and this year YouTube has added to its Super Bowl Ad Blitz voting site hooks to share spots on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Controversy can boost chatter as well. After the game, Audi crept up BrandBowl’s Twitter monitoring scoreboard as users disagreed on whether the “Green Police” had an eco-friendly message.

But earned media is ultimately in the control of consumers, and marketers with unappealing content might find themselves the target of a Twitter #advertisingfail hashtag. Twitter users were unimpressed with GoDaddy’s efforts this year, and Dockers, which included an online call to action in its commercial, was unprepared for Super Bowl levels of traffic to its contest site.

More advice from “What You Need to Know About Earned Media” on boosting earned-media exposure:

• Give people good content, especially content they can personalize and send on to their friends. The better the content, the more likely they will be to share it.
• Good creative that resonates with viewers will help spur social sharing and online discussion.

• Actively enable sharing by adding distribution buttons on Facebook, Twitter and other sites.
• Provide a contest or other incentives to encourage people to pass messages along.

“What You Need to Know About Earned Media” is part of a series of eMarketer Insight Briefs focused on social media marketing. Available exclusively to Total Access subscribers, the seven briefs, along with a PowerPoint slideshow, answer the most common and most pressing questions that businesses have about social media marketing.

Total Access subscribers, log in and view the Insight Briefs now. Learn more about an eMarketer Total Access subscription today.