What Are Basketball Fans Saying on Twitter?

Abstract

Social media receives growing interest from sports executives. Yet, very little is known about how to make use of such user-generated, unstructured data. By exploring tweets generated during Turkish Airlines Euroleague's Final Four event, which broadcasted the four tournaments of championship among four finalist teams, the authors studied how fans respond to gains and losses and how engaged they were during games through the course of the event. The authors found that favorable reactions were received when teams won, but the magnitude of unfavorable reaction was larger when teams lost. When it came to the organizer rather than the teams, the organizer of the event received most of the positive feedback. The authors also found that main source of tweets was smartphones while tablets were not among real-time feedback devices.