If there’s one event each year that turns the marketing and advertising world on its head, it’s the Super Bowl. As brands gear up for the Big Game, they develop new media strategies to make them stand out from the crowd and propel them to viral stardom.
Super Bowl social media campaigns are a key part of this cultural phenomenon, and they are the driver behind an annual boom in follower growth, engagement, impressions and mentions.
That’s not just due to the quality of the content, but also to the fact that the audience is much more tuned to all advertising channels, including social media and TV.
So let’s see what brands won the Big Game in 2024 on social media, shall we?
Super Bowl 2024 on social media: key stats and successful strategies
What is the Super Bowl?
The Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL) of the United States, which marks the end of that year’s NFL playing season. It is by far considered to be the largest sporting event of the year in the U.S.
The Big Game, as it is known, is a huge money-maker, bringing in millions of dollars to the NFL each year and generating buzz (and sales) for all the brands involved.
Just consider this: according to Statista, companies are paying around $7 millions for a 30-second TV ad slot in 2024. Good thing social media ads are far cheaper.
How does social media shape the Super Bowl experience?
Leveraging instant connectivity and a massively inflated audience, social media manages to influence just every aspect of the Super Bowl advertising and viewing experience, before, during and after the Big Game has ended.
At this point in time, the Super Bowl and social media have become tightly intertwined, shaping and showing how fans engage with the game, its commercials, and the much-anticipated halftime show.
For the Super Bowl, social media acts as an amplifier, increasing the reach and impact of brand campaigns and commercials and massively boosting brand awareness and engagement.
What’s more, the Super Bowl provides marketers with a unique opportunity to leverage social media listening tools to track mentions, sentiment, and trends related to this sporting event.
This big influx of data helps them understand audience preferences, measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, and brainstorm ideas for future strategies.
Main strategies in Super Bowl social media marketing
There isn’t a fixed playbook for how brands should market themselves during the Super Bowl. However, as social media’s role in this sporting event has expanded in recent years, a few common strategies have emerged:
Building up pre-game hype
When it comes to the Super Bowl, some brands choose to forgo the element of surprise and release their commercials early, ahead of the Big Game. At first, that might seem unwise.
Why would a brand invest so much time, effort and capital into an ad that will be old news by the day of the game? Why would they risk ruining the hype around their brand-new Super Bowl?
Well, turns out there is some merit to releasing ads early. Essentially, this strategy gives brands the opportunity (and time) to generate more buzz around their product, build brand awareness and, if they play their cards right, even increase their social media fanbase.
Moreover, prereleasing ads early also helps draw attention to the brand, singling it out from the rest, so the audience will hopefully be looking out for that specific commercial during the actual game.
Some brands choose to release their full-length commercials early, others choose to share short teasers ahead of time, and some create a series of Super Bowl social media posts that they share regularly in the days leading up to the Big Game.
For example, Dunkin’ Donuts started teasing their Super Bowl ad campaign (featuring last year’s favorite, Ben Affleck & a few guest stars) on February 2nd, and since then, they have shared 16 more Super Bowl videos on TikTok alone.
The first 3 videos released on February 2nd now have more than 10M views combined. Way to build up the hype!
Following up with live social media engagement
Regardless of whether they prerelease their ads or simply launch them during the Big Game, brands tend to be very active on social media during and around the time of the Super Bowl.
Live posting and/or engaging with their community during the game or at halftime helps brands connect with their audience and create an authentic collective experience. This type of engagement is right up Gen Z’s alley.
See how Verizon jumped in to engage with their fans on TikTok as soon as the content was live and people started commenting:
By tapping into viral content, memes and pop culture references, brands manage to blur the lines between viewer and advertiser, something that is simply not possible outside of social media.
Showcasing post-game highlights
Super Bowl social media campaigns certainly don’t end with the final whistle of the Big Game. In fact, a significant part of the Super Bowl content is shared in the hours and days following the game.
Brands leverage the post-game buzz to share highlights from the game, giving people the chance to revisit moments they might have missed during the live airing of the commercial.
Even if that's not the case, sharing highlights (or more often, memes) from the big event is an ingenious way to continue building engagement around Super Bowl social media ads and cultivating the sense of community among sports enthusiasts and brand fans alike.
In the example below, Uber Eats continued to share posts after the Big Game ended, still related to their main Super Bowl tagline: “Whatever you forget, remember Uber Eats gets groceries."
Super Bowl social media data: Top-performing brands ranked
I think it’s become pretty clear by now that the Super Bowl is more than a battle of football teams, it’s also a battle of brands, and a fierce one at that!
So we figured this would be an awesome opportunity to take a peek at the data and let it show us which brands made the biggest splash at the Super Bowl in 2024.
For this Super Bowl social media analysis, we picked the 15 best-performing participating brands with a strong presence on social media, based on key performance metrics such as engagement, impressions, post volume and more.
They are:
- Booking.com
- e.l.f Cosmetics
- Verizon
- DraftKings
- Paramount+
- Dunkin' Donuts
- CeraVe
- Starry
- Toyota
- DoorDash
- Budweiser
- Uber Eats
- Hellmann's
- BMW
- Doritos
Top brands by engagement - Super Bowl 2024
Turns out the brand that ended up benefiting the most from the Super Bowl buzz is DraftKings, an American sports betting company.
For them, the Super Bowl is the busiest time of the year, and they attract a lively community of sports enthusiasts, which likely explains the high level of engagement.
As for Paramount+ and e.l.f. Cosmetics, they both prereleased their Super Bowl ads, which generated a lot of engagement over the last 30 days.
Also, as expected, TikTok is the most engaging platform for most brands in this social media analysis.
Top brands by audience growth - Super Bowl 2024
By taking part in the Super Bowl phenomenon, some brands walked away with something (slightly) more long-lasting than engagement.
They saw a major boost in audience growth, meaning new people are now following them as a result of their Super Bowl campaign.
At the top of this list, we find Booking.com, e.l.f. Cosmetics and Dunkin Donuts, three brands that partnered up with A-list celebrities like Ben Afflek, Tina Fey and Gina Torres to produce their Super Bowl commercials.
Another thing they have in common is that they, too, teased / released their Super Bowl social media ads early.
Interestingly enough, Booking.com’s ad was also the most-watched ad during the program.
Laura Kaye, Global Social Media Director at Booking.com, has shared with us some insights about their Super Bowl social media strategy:
Booking.com’s social content strategy has our customers’ mindset at the core. We create content that people want to watch in hopes that when someone sees something of ours in-feed, they not only watch and engage but follow us for more. Our SuperBowl approach took the creative concept of our TVC and looked for social trends that we could lean into to bring it to life. With the help of a diverse set of creators, we were able to show how with Booking.com you can Book Whoever You Want to Be - in an entertaining and socially-native way.
Top brands by impressions - Super Bowl 2024
One of the metrics that always gets inflated during this time of year is impressions. That’s due to the large number of people tuning into the Super Bowl - both on TV and on social media.
A lot of brands are seeking impressions because it equates to increased brand awareness.
This year, the winner in the category is Paramount+, which scored more 100M impressions across all social media platforms. It was on TikTok where Paramount+ enjoyed the highest visibility.
Most active brands during Super Bowl
Draft Kings seems to be a double winner, as it also ranked first as the most active brand at the Super Bowl, based on posts volume.
As we mentioned before, the Super Bowl is a busy time for sports betting companies like Draft Kings, so it makes sense that they would be posting more, especially on Twitter.
Although they don't come close to Draft Kings' level of posting activity, Paramount+ and DoorDash were also active on social media during the Super Bowl and in the days leading up to the event.
Top brand mentions on Instagram during Super Bowl 2024
Mentions are some of the most sought-after metrics on social media by brands who are looking to increase their brand awareness and get people talking about them.
This year, Booking.com was in the spotlight, with the highest amount of brand mentions, followed by DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Top celebrity mentions on Instagram during Super Bowl 2024
Finally, we have celebrity mentions. Here, the data did not surprise us at all.
Usher ranked first since he performed at the Halftime show and Taylor Swift ranked second as Kansas City Chiefs' Trevor Kelce's superstar girlfriend. Messi and Beyonce each made suprising appearances in Super Bowl commercials.
Lessons learned from Super Bowl social media content
If we were to sum up the Super Bowl social media experience in a few words, we'd say it was as spectacular as we expected.
As per usual, brands continued to partner up with top-rated celebrities to try to capture the spotlight, and for most of them, this strategy paid off.
Many brands saw spikes of engagement, audience growth, impressions and mentions, and these will mostly likely translate to sales in the days, weeks and months to come.
What's also worth mentioning is that a lot of Super Bowl social media activity took place on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube - video-first or video-heavy channels.
Several brands, like Booking.com, Paramount+ or e.l.f. Cosmetics, focused their efforts on just a couple of video content channels and that turned out to be a successful strategy, as it generated a high number of impressions, as well as new followers.
Methodology
For this Super Bowl Brands Performance Study, we analyzed social media posts between January 12 - February 12 2024 across five social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube) to identify top-performing brands that participated in this event.
We extracted cross-channel data on brands engagement, audience growth, impressions and post volume using Socialinsider’s Brands Benchmarks feature. Brand and celebrity mentions data was pulled using our Instagram Listening tool.
