Friday Fun: #Patriots vs. #Seahawks

Photo by Nike

Unless you live under a rock, you know that the New England Patriots won the AFC Championship and will be facing off this weekend with the Seattle Seahawks at Super Bowl 49 in sunny Glendale, AZ. With one SHIFT office smack dab in the middle of #PatriotsNation, we are obviously paying close attention to game news and media day reports.

In this Friday Fun post, we wanted to share a few fun things coming out of AZ. First up, this hilarious video of Marshawn Lynch playing Mortal Kombat against Gronkowski:

On that funny note, let’s compare the share of voice of Patriots vs. Seahawks hashtags. This is by no means scientific proof of anything. We compared the hashtags #patriots, #patriotsnation and #gopatriots with Seahawk’s hashtags – #seahawks, #seahawksnation, and #goseahawks – to see which fans are in fact the loudest online.

We looked at data from January 19th through the morning of January 30th, 2015 to avoid any favoritism during the games on the 18th influencing the outcomes. Across that 12 days, there was a huge bump in popularity of the hashtags for the Patriots, sadly we can likely attribute this at least in part, to “deflategate”. So while the Patriots “won” the conversation overall, we believe the level of tweets without the controversy would have been closer to a tie than a clear win. You see toward the end when the news died down, the team’s hashtags were neck in neck.

Taking a closer look at the breakdown by source, we see a more balanced distribution. The Patriots dominate two channels and the Seahawks dominate the other two channels. The hashtag game is definitely showing a tie more than a clear win, guess we’ll just have to watch the game to see the real winner. 😉

Now for a little more fun to take your mind off those pesky numbers and charts above, first, a cute fan-made Seahawks sendoff by Queen Anne Elementary. Even the Patriots’ fan hearts melted for this one.

Finally, if you’re a child of the 80s this theme song will now be stuck in your head all day but you’ll see an adorable look at the Patriots before they grew into the big players they are now.

Enjoy the game, no matter who you’re rooting for. #GoPats

Chel Wolverton
Account Manager, Marketing Technology
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