This upcoming Sunday is the 45th Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is known as the most watched television event every year. Some people will say it’s because of the commercials, but in-between those commercials will be a pretty awesome game of football. This year sees the Pittsburgh Steelers face-off against the Green Bay Packers.
A quick scan of all media sources shows that there seems to be a big build up for the Super Bowl. We see talk hit a peak about two weeks ago, during the final playoff games, but see talk on the rise again as we approach the big day.
According to online betting sites (not that we condone gambling) the Packers are favoured to win, but who can really trust Vegas? So, we decided to go our favourite authority, the general social media public. Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, we took a look to see what the social universe had to say about the upcoming gridiron battle.
In order to get a good handle on how each team looked over the course of the whole season we compared the number of mentions from September to today. A quick look shows that Pittsburgh seemed to be talked about on the whole more than Green Bay, but there were certain weeks when the Packers pulled ahead.
However, most sports fans will tell you that the whole season means nothing come playoff time. So, to that extent we decided to look at which team held the majority of social media conversations over the past two weeks since the playoffs ended and the teams going to the championship were decided. Here we can see that Pittsburgh seems to be the topic of most conversations.
Next, we thought we’d break down this talk a little bit more. Any football fan will tell you that sometimes a whole game could be won on either defense or offense alone. Because of that, we decided to break our analysis down to see what was being said.
A look at talk in the social media world about both teams defensive lines has interesting results. A look at which was being talked about more shows that Pittsburgh’s defense is getting more attention online. However, when we looked at the sentiment comparison we see that Green Bay looks to be just coming out on top with 28% positive talk, with Pittsburgh close behind at 27%. When we look at the negative sentiment towards each team’s defense, Pittsburgh seems to be the focus of more negative talk with 38% while Green Bay’s defense only has 35% negative.
From there we moved over to analyze the offense. Again we see that the Steelers seem to dominate the conversation. As well, we again see that the Packers seem to have a slight advantage in positive sentiment with their 26% just beating out the Steelers 25%. However, in a strange turn of events we see that the Packers also have more negative talk going on about their offense than their rivals with 43% compared to 42%.
Saving the best for last, we looked at how overall sentiment of both teams is looking. What we see here seems to go along with what the bookies are calling for. Green Bay seems to look more favourable with 56% positive sentiment and only 15% negative, while their rivals from Pittsburgh only have a 50% positive rating and a higher negative rating at 16%.
Looking at this data it appears that Las Vegas has made the right call by putting the Packers ahead of the Steelers. Although, as any good sports fan knows, anything can happen and we’ll just have to see how it plays out on game day.
Who’s your pick to win; Green Bay Packers or Pittsburgh Steelers? Let us know in the comments.
In light of the 2012 London Olympics and the limitations placed by the game’s organizers on social media activity, the upcoming Super Bowl is showing the world how it should be done.
