Looking back on the biggest game event this year, Super Bowl XLVI sure was a huge success. Marketing and advertising firm Nielsen released a report prior the game that speaks of the trends circling ad spending on national network and cable TV. Some of the interesting facts include the $10.9 billion advertising expenditure generated on National TV last year, up from $10.3 billion a year before. AT&T was declared the biggest TV advertiser, shelling out $423.5 million for the big game.

Obviously, brands and advertisers these days are geared more towards the social aspects of Super Bowl than the actual game itself. Here’s some interesting insight from SiliconAngle founder John Furrier about how social means business for some of the world’s largest brands. Super Bowl, being the biggest game of the year, is also the biggest event for brand and content marketing.

Get Tweetin’

Now, on to the social aspect that focuses directly to the game, Twitter Sentiment Analysis determines people’s impression of the opposing teams’ quarterbacks: New York Giants’ Eli Manning vs. New England Patriots’ Tom Brady. The analysis group analyzed 600,000 tweets and found out Manning has more positive sentiment with 65 percent market share, compared to Brady’s 62 percent.

Moreover, Techland Time reported that tweets peaked at 12,233 per second during the game last night. This figure emerged towards the end of the game. The second influx happened sometime during Madonna’s halftime performance with 10,245 tweets per second.  But the figure isn’t even very close to that of a Japanese TV screening of a movie called Castle in the Sky, which earned 25,000 tweets per second. But the largest number of microblogging was claimed by China’s Sina Weibo, which alleged to have peaked at 32,412 during Chinese New Year.

Mobile Made It

The Super Bowl has also given the social mobile world a great deal of traction. A study by mobile marketing company Velti reveals that fans are connecting beyond in-person friends, and expected a third of the spectator to watch the game with device in hand.

Because of mobile’s gaining traction, it has become a good alternative for brands to advertise in place of the insanely pricey $3.5 million 30-second ad slot during the game, focusing on heavy mobile usage and the social presence of fans instead.

We also have some interesting pre-game Super Bowl ad data from Clearspring. Sharing via mobile was up 500 percent from last year and overall sharing was up 143 percent from last year. Shares to and clicks from Twitter were up 116 percent from last year, while Tumblr’s and Facebook’s were up 615 percent and 18 percent respectively from last year. Share-to-click from email were down 16 percent last year, which is the only social sharing aspect to show a decline.

AddThis gave us some post-game data as well. According to the report, most of the country is supporting the New York Giants’ win, and this matches what we are seeing in prognostications and in the sports books. Honda and Priceline both crushed it when it came to awareness of their ad and brand. GoDaddy was completely flat, which indicates that perhaps their ads are getting played out.  VW launched their ad too early, and did not capture the same attention that Honda and Priceline did.

Moreover, InMobi’s Super Bowl XLVI Mobile Consumption Survey and revealed that nearly 40 percent of respondents used mobile devices in response to TV ads, and 45 percent estimated they would spend 30 minutes or more on their mobile devices during the game. Check out InMobi Research for the full report.