Forget the football – as usual, it’s the brands that did battle royal during this year’s Super Bowl. But this year’s big game was a little different from preceding years: While two years ago tweeting about the game was really left to the geek domain, and last year’s Super Bowl social media was only starting to stir things up, this year social was a major player in the great American football spectacle.

If you missed any of the ads to, oh, answer the door for pizza delivery or something, there are of course umpteen roundup sites where you can watch them one after the other; we went with Ad Age‘s showcase, just as it seems relatively unaffected by traffic volume this soon after the game.

So how did the big names in social media take part in the national Super Bowl party? Foursquare tried a detour from its hyperlocal focus, offering a badge to anyone nationwide who checked in to the game and followed it up with a shout including the name of one of the teams. (In theory, at least; I followed the instructions to the letter and have yet to receive my trinket.) The official Sports on Facebook page hosted FB-wide “Like” voting on ads – but as of the day after the game, it only boasts 2,113,503 fans. (Only? Well, yes, if you look at it in Super Bowl-sized proportions.) The NFL’s page has 2,506,210.

So where did most of the chatter about the Super Bowl happen? Looks like on our own Facebook walls, Foursquare shouts and Twitter posts rather than a landing spot provided by a big name. Of course, the rise of social media since the last game has also been accompanied by a huge rise in social metrics – this means you could drown in the numbers if you wanted to, or at least get your feet good and wet. Via Mashable:

– Online chatter about Super Bowl ads increased 9% over last year in the 12 hours following the game’s start

– Chrysler’s Eminem spot was mentioned 19,781 times on Twitter during the hour it premiered

– Ads took second place in overall Super Bowl-related topics mentioned online, after the game itself; following that were Christina Aguilera’s “Star Spangled Banner” and the Black Eye Peas at halftime

– Pepsi Max received the biggest boost in search and sharing as a result of their ad, with more than a 3,000% increase in sharing activity; surprisingly, Groupon didn’t make the cut in the top-10 brand lift table, even with a controversial spot promoting a company a lot of folks haven’t heard of

This is also the first Super Bowl where we’ve seen social media featuring explicitly in the ads; Audi’s inclusion of the #ProgressIs hashtag got a great deal of press in the days before the game, and Chevrolet’s ad (in which a lovestruck guy can’t wait to check his Facebook feed for news about his first date, so asks his car) was as much about Facebook as it was about the product itself.

Did your experience of the game change at all as a result of this first truly social Super Bowl? And if you contributed to the global chatter about the event, where did you do it – Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or somewhere else? Let us know in the comments – and we’d love to hear which commercial was your favorite, too.