If you look to social media engagement as the benchmark for success, Esurance’s (non) Super Bowl ad campaign hit a grand slam – er, scored a touchdown I guess.

If you tweeted out the hashtag #EsuranceSave30 in the day and a half following the Super Bowl, you weren’t alone. According to the company, they saw 5.4 million uses of that hashtag in the 36 hours following the big game – 200,000 of which came in the first minute after the Esurance ad aired.

If you don’t have 30 seconds to watch that video and missed the Super Bowl, here’s a quick rundown. The premise of Esurance’s ad was that they wanted to give away the $1.5 million they saved by airing an ad after the Super Bowl as opposed to during the Super Bowl. All people had to do was tweet that hashtag and/or follow Esurance on Twitter to enter the sweepstakes.

The company just handed out the prize last night with the help of Jimmy Kimmel.

“The sweepstakes demonstrated the power of a hashtag when #EsuranceSave30 was tweeted more than 5 million times in less than thirty six hours, said Leo Burnett Chief Creative Officer Susan Credle. “Esurance trending over the Super Bowl Sunday night is proof that when you use mass media to announce a social media idea, it works really, really well.”

Here are some more stats about Esurance’s social media-based ad experiment:

– 1.4 million hashtag uses in the first hour and 4.5 million in the first 24 hours
– 2.6 billion social impressions on Twitter
– 332,000 views of the Esurance commercial on YouTube
– 261,000 new followers on the official Esurance Twitter account — an increase of nearly 3,000 percent
– A 12x spike in visits to the Esurance website in the first hours of the sweepstakes

It seems like the experiment payed off – if the goal was to get people talking. What this will or will not do for the company’s bottom line remains to be seen.

Image via YouTube