With Superbowl 45 less than a few weeks away, Twitter has highlighted some interesting stats regarding the effect of one of the most watched games in the US upon the twittersphere.
Last year, during key moments of Super Bowl XLIV, about 40% of all Tweets were related to the game. As the game ended, this number was closer to 50%. This year, one-third of the players who were in the NFL playoffs are on Twitter. And, at some points during last Sunday’s AFC and NFC championship games, virtually all trends were football-related. (Official Twitter Blog)
While these stats are impressive, truth be told the World Cup in June of 2010 still holds the record for the highest number of tweets sent per second, and it will be interesting to see if the Superbowl will be able to top that due to the social network’s popularity amongst the sporting crowd.
Twitter has also announced a strategic partnership with the NFL as well as VISA, which should make it easier to track how popular certain topics are within the twittersphere (note: as of this moment the Pittsburgh Steelers are edging out Greenbay Packers in mentions).
Whether or not Superbowl 45 surpasses the previous record set by the World Cup has yet to be seen, although hopefully Twitter’s new data center will be able to handle the load without encountering any fail whales or slow downs this year.