Who tweets more, fans of the Falcons or Patriots?

The Falcons and Patriots will play for the Super Bowl tropy in Houston on Sunday. We’ve already been keeping score on Twitter. Photo by Curtis Compton/ccompton@ajc.com

Credit: ccompton@ajc.com

Credit: ccompton@ajc.com

The Falcons and Patriots will play for the Super Bowl tropy in Houston on Sunday. We’ve already been keeping score on Twitter. Photo by Curtis Compton/ccompton@ajc.com

As Super Bowl LI approaches, fans of the Atlanta Falcons and New England Patriots have taken to Twitter to discuss their favorite players, argue with opposing fans, or take advantage of the game’s hype to promote their business.

I was curious about which team’s fans were more active on Twitter, so I wrote a computer script to pull every tweet with keywords related to either team, such as #RiseUp or @AtlantaFalcons, in real time. The database now contains 210,166 tweets and counting. Using this data, I created the graph below to show how many Super Bowl-related tweets are sent every minute.

The data reveals a few interesting trends. It looks like Patriots fans stay online a little later than Falcons fans, with some of the highest rates of tweeting coming around 11pm for Pats fans while Atlanta tweets peak around 9pm. You can also see occasional sudden spikes in the rate of tweets, which can happen when a celebrity account tweets about the game.

This graph is updated automatically every 5 minutes, so if you’re curious about which team is better represented on Twitter as the game approaches, keep checking back at this page to stay updated.