Ibm Index Reveals Twitter Love For Brit Hopefuls
With this year’s Wimbledon Championships reaching its second week, followers from across the world have been taking to twitter to vent their emotions – both positive and negative – around the matches, with 1.4 million tweets already posted around the competition.
As of Sunday, and despite his early exit, Rafael Nadal remains the most talked about player from this year’s Championship so far, with 108,585 mentions on Twitter since the tournament began. Roger Federer and British hopeful Andy Murray take second and third place with 84,385 and 73,569 mentions respectively.
In the women’s side of the draw, Maria Sharapova has reeled in more than 59,240 tweets, followed by Laura Robson with 41,896. No.1 seed Serena Williams is third on the list with 40,110 mentions.
In terms of popularity however, fans have got behind the British players this year with Andy Murray having the highest percentage of positive mentions among the male players. More than a third (37%) of all tweets about Murray carried positive sentiment, with half (52%) remaining neutral and a tenth (11%) negative.
The most loved player of the Championships, however, was 19 year-old Laura Robson, with an astonishing 44% of all tweets mentioning her expressing support for the player. 50% remained neutral and just 7% were negative.
Fuelled by shocking turns of events – including Federer’s defeat by world No. 116 Stakhovsky – Wednesday proved to be the day fans were most vocal, amassing more than 440,000 Wimbledon related tweets throughout the 24 hours.
While half a million people are expected to attend the 2013 Wimbledon Championships, IBM’s uses analytics, cloud computing and mobile technologies to measure sentiment from tennis fans all over the world.
