Patrick generated massive social media impact at Daytona

During a Speedweeks in which she twice made NASCAR history, #10-Danica Patrick's performance triggered some unprecedented reverberations in social media, too. Repucom, a global company with an office in Charlotte, found that Patrick had 971 million impressions on Twitter in the eight days spanning when she became the first woman to capture a Sprint Cup pole position to the first to lead the Daytona 500. By comparison, the 2012 Daytona 500 pole winner, Carl Edwards, had 15 million impressions during the same timeframe last year, and Patrick had 19 million in the two months entering her Daytona 500 debut last season. With an advanced algorithm that has a 3% margin of error, impressions are calculated through tweets, retweets and replies about a topic and the number of followers associated with the accounts.

"It's staggering," Repucom vice president Peter Laatz told USA TODAY Sports. "That's a really good thing for the sport, and it's great for her and great for her sponsors. We thought last year was a big deal until we looked at the numbers from this year." Repucom, which measures the impact and valuation of sponsorships across several sports and tracks close to 1,700 NASCAR brands, also estimated that primary sponsor Go Daddy received 1,203 seconds of on-screen branding during the Daytona 500 that was equivalent to $2.9 million in media value. During Patrick's last full season in the Izod IndyCar Series in 2011, Go Daddy had 5,637 seconds of screen time but nearly half the media value ($1.5 million) because NASCAR's ratings and reach dwarf rival racing series. USA Today