Early numbers indicate that last night’s Super Bowl between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers broadcast on CBS set new records for number of TV viewers and amount of social activity on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, the two events that triggered the greatest number of Tweets did not involve the teams or players, but rather Beyonce’s halftime show and the partial blackout during the third quarter.

“CBS says last night’s game earned a 48.1 rating, which means it drew a few hundred thousand more U.S. households than the 2011 Super Bowl, which held the previous record with a 47.9 rating,” reports Peter Kafka for AllThingsD. “Each ratings point equals about 1.14 million households, so once you’re done rounding, the audience for both games was right around 54 million homes.”

“Social tracker Trendrr says social activity was up 2.7x, from 17.5 million comments to 47.7 million,” notes Kafka. “Competitor Bluefin thinks comments were up 2.5x, from 12.2 million to 30.6 million. Twitter itself tracked 22.1 million comments, up from 13.7 million last year.”

While Beyonce generated 268,000 Tweets per minute, the most tweeted play of the game was in response to Ravens wide receiver Jacoby Jones who had a 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown, generating 181,000 Tweets per minute.

According to the Twitter blog, there were 24.1 million Tweets about the game and halftime show: “By the beginning of the second half, the volume of Tweets had already surpassed last year’s Tweet total.” The greatest social chatter came from the following game moments: the power outage, Jones’ kickoff return, Ravens’ victory, Jones’ 56-yard reception for touchdown in the second quarter, and Gore’s touchdown for the 49ers.

“On Facebook, the Ravens winning the game topped the social network’s big Super Bowl moments, followed by the Beyonce performance, the blackout, and the Jones kickoff return,” reports USA Today. “As for the most mentioned players, Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis — who announced his retirement before the start of the playoffs — finished first, followed by Super Bowl MVP quarterback Joe Flacco and 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the numbers point out more chatter, but not many more viewers. “This actually looks quite a bit like last year’s numbers, which saw chatter go way up while actual viewing dropped a tiny bit,” explains Kafka. “And we’ve seen other examples, like last fall’s MTV Music Video Awards, where social metrics went up a bunch while ratings slumped.”

“So perhaps it’s time to stop associating increased Twitter and Facebook traffic with increased ratings,” he adds. “Social activity may help the TV guys keep an audience, and that’s certainly a good thing from their perspective. But my hunch is what we’re really seeing is an increase in the per capita volume of social chatter. That is, people who like to talk about TV on Twitter and Facebook are even more likely to talk about TV than they were last year, or the year before that. Now we have to figure out what that means for advertisers, programmers and the social networks themselves.”