While millions of football fans watched the Packers face off against the Steelers in the Super Bowl, a group of University of Georgia researchers were more interested in the commercials.

The social networking site Twitter helped them find out exactly how the ads made people feel.

The team from UGA’s Terry College of Business spent Super Bowl Sunday analyzing nearly a million tweets about TV spots that aired during the big game.

A special computer program helped organize the posts into categories of emotion like happiness, love, surprise, and hate to name a few.

Piyush Kumar led the research.

He says the information could be useful for marketers who want to know if and how their ads resonate with potential customers.

"What this allows marketers to really do is to get an instantaneous response in the language of the listener or the reader or the poster or the brand user or the viewer," says Kumar.

According to the results ,happiness and love were the most common emotions generated by the Super Bowl ads.

Kumar says the instant feedback from Twitter’s estimated 200 million users could help companies fine tune their ad campaigns.

Tags: University of Georgia, Super Bowl, Terry College of Business, Piyush Kumar, Super Bowl ads, Super Bowl commercials