Football fans are invaluable to their favorite teams, lending their support all season and into the Super Bowl. For proof, you don’t need look any further than the Seattle Seahawks’ fans, who set a world record for crowd noise during the team’s home games this season. While neither team can claim home field advantage at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, which team’s fans give them an edge in the digital playing fields? We took a close look at how fans connect with their favorite teams using social media and mobile ahead of the big game.
Many football fans will likely join their own huddle via social media come game day. In 2013, viewers sent 26.1 million tweets during Super Bowl XLVII. And this year’s teams are already attracting more fans on Twitter in the run-up to the big game: according to Nielsen’s SocialGuide, a unique audience of 10.9 million people saw a total of nearly 2.5 million tweets about the Jan. 19 AFC Championship game on CBS, and 11.4 million people saw 5 million tweets about the NFC Championship game on FOX the same day.
Football fans are also glued to their smartphones, often times using mobile devices as second screens during the game. In fact, more than 10 million U.S. adults used fantasy football apps on smartphones at the start of the season (September 2013). In December, more than 9 million fans accessed the NFL Mobile app, twice as many as last season, using the smartphone app for an average of 37 minutes each. Most users of the NFL Mobile app were men (74%). Fans with household incomes between $75,000-$100,000 were 43 percent more likely to open the app compared to the average adult smartphone user. And with Hispanics making up both a growing group of smartphone owners and football fans, this demographic made up nearly one in five users (19%) of the NFL Mobile app.
No matter which team tops the scoreboard at the end of the night, fans are likely to use digital media to keep score on all the action.
