It seems almost impossible to find commercials these days that don’t have some form of social reference. Brands are always throwing their Facebook pages, Twitter handles and Insatgram stream at people. It’s now part of the norm.

There is no bigger place to make a big splash than the Super Bowl, arguably the biggest sporting event in the United States. According to Marketing Land ^[1] 50% of this year’s ads had Twitter references beating out all other social networks.

Marketing Land says that this is a huge change from the previous year when both Facebook and Twitter only got mentioned eight times out of the 59 commercials.

“So, for Twitter, the change from eight mentions to 26 is a gain of more than 300 percent, while Facebook saw a 50 percent drop in mentions,” says the marketing site.

According to Twitter this year’s event surpassed ^[2] last year in tweets with more 24-million mentions on the social network.

The non-halftime entertainment peaked at 231 500 tweets-per-minute, during the power outage. While Beyonce’s halftime performance generated 5.5 million of the 24.1 million tweets, peaking at 268 000 tweets-per-minute at the end of her performance.

When the New York Giants took on the New England Patriots there were only 13.7 million game-related tweets, peaking at of 12 333 per second. Madonna’s halftime performance at the 2012 Super Bowl peaked at 10 245 tweets-per-second.

“The biggest surprise of the game was the 33:55 power outage that halted the Superdome action. And during that hiatus, Twitter was most definitely on. Several parody accounts (e.g. @superbowllights) popped up to provide some comedic relief as anticipation built,” says Twitter’s blog.

The outage inspire some humour in brands entertaining the audience when the game came to a 30 minutes standstill.

Calvin Klein’s exercising man Vine video was probably the most innovative:

Since the lights are still out… vine.co/v/b1iiiiUz5uq ^[3] #SB47 ^[4]

— Calvin Klein (@CalvinKlein) February 4, 2013 ^[5]

While Oreo’s dunking in the dark was the most retweeted:

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29… ^[6]

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013 ^[7]

Other Twitter highlights from the game:

• Power outage: 231 500 TPM
• 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jones: 185 000 TPM
• Clock expires; Ravens win: 183 000 TPM
• Jones catches 56 yard pass for Ravens TD (end of 2nd quarter): 168 000 TPM
• Gore TD for 49ers: 131 000 TPM