March Madness Is Taking Over Social Media

March Madness Is Taking Over Social Media
By Todd Grossman

The full (64 field) March Madness tournament officially starts today, but social media has been in a tournament frenzy since Sunday when the brackets were revealed. More than 600,000+ mentions of March Madness, NCAA Tournament or related terms have been recorded across all social media in the past week.

Mentions of March Madness have spiked up over 300% since the tournament teams were finalized on Selection Sunday. The biggest peak came between 6-7pm ET during the CBS live selection show.

The hashtag #MarchMadness has already been used more than 150k times over the last 7 days. The other major hashtag being used in the buildup was #SelectionSunday which has been used 113k times over the last 7 days, not far off the main March Madness hashtag.

But who is going to win it all? According to social media, the early leaders out of the gate for most mentions are: North Carolina with more than 26,000+ mentions since Sunday, Kentucky with 24,000+, Kansas with 13,800+, Duke with 13,600+, Villanova with 13,389+, followed by Florida and Michigan with approximately 11,000+ each. Syracuse, which did not make the field, a surprise to some, logged more than 8,000 mentions.

March Madness – Social Media’s Favorite Teams

One trending theme is the name of actress Julie Louis-Dreyfus, after she tweeted as her Seinfeld character Elaine celebrating the Northwestern Wildcats selection into the tournament with the infamous “Elaine dance.” Louis-Dreyfus is a graduate of Northwestern and her son is a walk-on player for the Wildcats basketball team. And Northwestern even shows up on the list of top teams being discussed, with 8,700 mentions.

Todd Grossman is the CEO of Talkwalker, a social data intelligence company.