Big Data was a big part of the first big debate.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump battled it out Monday night at Long Island’s Hofstra University in the first of their three debates as they race to become the next US president. The candidates sparred over “America’s direction,” “achieving prosperity” and “securing America” — basically anything — in a debate that was expected to draw an audience on par with the Super Bowl.

While Trump said during the spirited debate he has the “winning temperament” to be president, he claimed his Democratic rival doesn’t have the “stamina” for the position. Clinton fired back in many different ways, saying the Republican candidate wasn’t prepared to debate and isn’t qualified to be commander in chief.

“You know what else I’m prepared for? I’m prepared to be president,” Clinton said. “And that’s a good thing.”

With the race in a virtual dead heat, the debate provoked an outpouring of political expression on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media. With that expectation, Clinton’s team recently sent supporters an email asking them to “advocate on every online platform on the night she goes head to head with Trump.” Meanwhile, Trump bought a Snapchat filter.

But the flood of data from social media reaction from the debate will likely paint a better picture, generating compelling and instantly useful information for campaigns. Companies like Fastly, L2 Political, Cambridge Analytica, NationBuilder, NGP VAN and TargetedVictory extract signals from piles of big data scraped from the social web, particularly Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Both campaigns employ internal teams that process these signals, using the data to shape messaging and their get-out-the-vote strategies.

“A lot of people are looking at this campaign, socially speaking, and want to compare this to the 2012 and 2008 [presidential] races,” said Kellan Terry, a data analyst for Brandwatch, which measures social media reaction. “But there’s really not one to be made. All conventional wisdom is gone.”

Fastly said it saw a spike of 1.5 million requests per second, an increase of 3,000 percent, in media sites with fact checkers when Clinton referenced her own website and its fact checkers while she criticized Trump for alleged inaccuracies about jobs and taxes. social media also saw a 25 percent increase when Clinton dissed Trump’s tax policies calling them, “Trumped-Up trickle down” economics, which became the hashtag #TrumpedUpTrickleDown and began trending early on Twitter, Fastly added.

Other popular trending terms on Twitter included “#debatenight” with 2.4 million tweets, “Donald Trump,” with more than 2.1 million, “President” (1.1 million) and “The Donald” (1 million). “Fact check” also resonated with users, registering more than 326,000 tweets.

Big data firm Sysomos discovered similar results by scraping Twitter in real time during and immediately following the debate. Its tool scrapes the social web, then applies Boolean searches — complex conditional queries — to suss trending content.

Here were the top trending quotes from the debate on Twitter, by each candidate by the numbers, according to Sysomos:

Clinton

Total mentions: 1,321,073

Most retweeted:

These were the top trending quotes from the debate on Twitter, by candidate:

Clinton

1. “Trumped up, trickle down,” with 23,436 total mentions.

2. “I know you live in your own reality,” 26,668 total mentions.

3. “Maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is,” 3,508 total mentions.

Trump

1. “Hillary Clinton has been fighting ISIS her entire adult life,” with 31,557 total mentions.

2. “Braggadocious,” with 14,040 total mentions.

3. “Stop and frisk,” 83,436 total mentions.

4. “Good temperament,” 9,741 total mentions.

While he may not have fared well during the debate, Trump, whose Twitter handle is @realDonaldTrump, dominated the Twitter talk during the 90 minute-long clash. He captured 62 percent of the debate share of conversation on the social network compared with the 38 percent held by Clinton, whose Twitter handle is @HillaryClinton.

Nonetheless, effect of real-time social media on the debates is still being measured, said Dan Franklin, a political science professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

That’s because, according to Brandwatch’s Terry, the candidates are on a stage under bright lights, unaware of how their sentiment is playing on social media and whether it will lead to a positive or negative trend and a hashtag.

“They won’t benefit immediately from the social analysis, but they surely will review it later,” he said. “They will get to see for themselves and say, ‘In this moment I did very well,’ and ‘This is something I need to work on.'”

Franklin agrees, using football terminology to further the point.

“There will be no ‘Hail Mary’s’ or ‘running out the clock,’ at least for now,” Franklin said. “However, in the future, it might be useful for candidates to think in those terms.”