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?
Key takeaways
- DraftKings is the leading brand in terms of social media growh, generating the highest engagement and impressions.
- elf cosmetics scored the highest audience growth its Super Bowl social media marketing efforts.
- Among the strategies used for their social media campaigns brands leveraged pre-game hype, interactive content, and also during and post-game highlights.
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 $8 millions for a 30-second TV ad slot in 2025. 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 generate social media growth, both in terms of engagement and audience growth.
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.
Developing side-picking content and creatives
Brands taking part in the Super Bowl-centered social scene capitalized on the rivalry aspect of the game by crafting side-picking content—interactive posts that encouraged fans to declare their allegiance to a team, commercial, or even a brand-backed campaign.
Taking inspiration from viral content like this post from Doritos. Brands used polls, dueling hashtags, and split-screen visuals to fuel-friendly fan competition.
Inciting conversations through prediction invitations
A major trend in Super Bowl 2025 social media marketing was leveraging audience predictions to spark engagement before, during, and after the game. Brands turned to interactive content like polls and live Q&A sessions—to get users involved in forecasting game results.
Platforms like Instagram and TikTok saw brands encourage fans to predict final scores, MVP selections, and unexpected game moments using branded hashtags.
Companies like Budweiser and DraftKings amplified these campaigns by offering prizes, exclusive merch, or discounts for correct guesses, turning casual viewers into active brand participants.
Highlighting iconic moments of the current edition on the spot
Super Bowl 2025 brands mastered the art of real-time marketing by capturing and amplifying iconic game moments as they happened. Memes, quick-turnaround video edits, and witty social media reactions allowed brands to stay relevant and engage audiences in the heat of the moment.
For example, brands like Bud Light and Doritos quickly reacted to unexpected halftime show moments, creating shareable GIFs and engaging commentary that spread across Instagram.
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram Stories became hubs for live reactions, behind-the-scenes exclusives, and instant brand tie-ins with the game’s biggest moments.
Brands could stay at the forefront of Super Bowl conversations by participating in them and shaping them, using content that tapped into the real-time emotions of viewers.
Presenting Super Bowl players’ stories
Super Bowl 2025 wasn’t just about the game—it was about the personal journeys, triumphs, and emotions of the players who took the field. Brands and media outlets leveraged these compelling narratives to create deeper connections with fans, making the event more than just a competition.
For instance, Philadelphia Eagles’ running back Saquon Barkley celebrated his first Super Bowl win with his fiancée, Anna Congdon, and their son, Saquon Jr. Their emotional on-field moment quickly went viral, sparking heartfelt conversations on social media.
Another standout story was rookie cornerback Cooper DeJean, who made history by returning an interception for a touchdown on his 22nd birthday. His performance became one of the most talked-about moments of the game, with fans and brands celebrating his achievement across various platforms.
Brands leveraged the Super Bowl to craft compelling narratives extending beyond the game by highlighting players' personal achievements and emotional triumphs.
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.
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 in the Super Bowl-related social media scene in 2025.
For this Super Bowl social media analysis, we picked the 5 best-performing participating brands with a strong presence on social media, based on key performance metrics such as engagement, impressions, and post volum.
They are:
- DrafKings
- Fan Duel
- Bud Light
- elf cosmetics
- Doritos
Top brands by engagement - Super Bowl 2025
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.
Notable engagement was also spark by brands like Fan Duel (actually one of DrafKing's competitors) and Bud Light, showcasing how important is for, especially for brands belonging to an industry closed to the Super Bowl universe to leverage the momentum of the Big Game.
Also, as expected, TikTok is the most engaging platform for most brands in this social media analysis.
Top brands by audience growth - Super Bowl 2025
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 e.l.f. Cosmetics and DraftKings, for which TikTok was the major growth engine.
Top brands by impressions - Super Bowl 2025
One of the social media 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 Draftking, which scored more 12M impressions across TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. One again, TikTok had a hight impact on the brand's success.
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.
Although they don't come close to Draft Kings' level of posting activity, Fan Diel and and Doritos were also active on social media during the Super Bowl and in the days leading up to the event.
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 and Instagram - video-first or video-heavy channels.
Several brands, such as Doritos and elf cosmetics, focused their efforts on just a couple of video content channels, which generated a high number of engagement and impressions.
Methodology
For this Super Bowl Brands Performance Study, we analyzed social media posts between January 11 - February 11 2025 across three social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, ) 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.
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