An Analysis of Tweets from ACC Basketball Teams to Determine Fan

Engagement Based on Record

Tom Castle and Kelsi Stewart

Introduction

Sports have always been a cornerstone in the media market. “Penny Papers” found their

push by being able to share sports scores and stories [1]. Radio introduced the concept

of sports commentating with “Mike and the Mad Dog”. Television was probably the

most connected media to sports- altering the way the game was played, how players

were paid, and even the way players and teams were perceived by fans [2]. However,

social media has become the newest form of media to grab a foothold in the sports

world. Commentary, news, and insights about teams can now come straight from the

source. Fans are no longer just watching the games, but are now able to interact with the

organizations and events 24/7 [3]. Twitter has become the primary platform of sports

fans and organizations because of its written style and format of making information

public quickly. Twitter uses specific forms of engagement measures; sharing or

“retweeting”, and liking or “favoriting”. These measures of engagement can indicate a

brand’s popularity or success on the platform. This paper utilizes Twitter’s engagement

tools to measure if college basketball fans are more likely to lose or increase loyalty

based on the success of the team, and the gender of the players. The Atlantic Coast

Conference (ACC) is a dominating force of college basketball with powerhouse teams

like North Carolina, Duke, NC State, Louisville, and Virginia. It particularly became

more powerful when collegiate players went on to have success in the National

Basketball Association, like Michael Jordan who played for North Carolina, and when

the ACC tournament gained traction and popularity across the country. In today’s
modern world, social media is the skill that sports teams have to master in order to

remain a top team in their field. To gain the best insight to fan engagement with college

basketball teams, the “elite” conference is the best choice to use. This way, not only were

teams being measured by how well they played (or how well they were known for

playing), but also how much fan engagement occurred during the conference games of

the season.

Research Question and Purpose

With the establishment of social media engagement’s relationship with sports, the field

can be narrowed to a more specific subject. This paper seeks to identify which ACC

basketball fans are more likely to adjust loyalty based on the team’s record throughout

the season; the men’s team or the women’s team. By looking at the levels of engagement

from the school’s Twitter accounts from both the men’s and women’s teams during

conference games for the 2019-2020 regular season, comparisons can be drawn on if

fans are more likely to engage with the team via Twitter. The purpose of this analysis is

to determine if external variables have an impact on how ACC fans interact with their

teams via social media. The hypothesis is that women’s teams will have fans with less

loyalty than men’s teams. This means that the better teams in the women’s group will

have more fan engagement, whereas the worst teams will have the worst fan

engagement. The secondary hypothesis is that there will be a decline in fan engagement

with the men’s teams as the rankings get lower, but that major teams like Duke and

UNC will have outliers.

Methods

For this analysis, tweets from the 2019-2020 regular season were taken from each ACC

basketball team’s Twitter accounts. The data included men’s and women’s teams from
15 different schools; Boston College (BC), Clemson University (Clem), Duke University,

Florida State University (FSU), Georgia Institute of Technology (GT), University of

Louisville, University of Miami, North Carolina State University (NC State), University

of Notre Dame, University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), Syracuse University, University of North

Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC), University of Virginia (UVA), Virginia Tech (VT), and Wake

Forest University (WF).

This meant that there were 30 data sets, one per team, with every tweet from the 2019-

2020 season. The data sets were large, and the focus of the analysis was only on

conference games. Therefore, all the data was narrowed down to just tweets published

on game day of conference games for the regular season.

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t affect the dataset in any significant way because the

regular season had already ended when the pandemic took effect. However, the data

took a significant amount of time to clean because a third-party source called

Twitonomy was used to accumulate the data. This source used Greenwhich Mean Time

(GMT) to date the tweets, and therefore affected the data that would’ve been drawn.

Therefore each data set had to be converted to Eastern Standard Time (EST) so that the

dates and game times would be accurate to the teams’ schedules.

Following that conversion, all tweets from game day were selected and placed into a new

spreadsheet. For example; Clemson’s Men’s team played Virginia’s Men’s team on

November 5, 2019. All tweets from the Clemson Men’s Basketball account on November

5, 2019 were used in the analysis. This was repeated for each team, on each conference

game day. The average engagement counts were analyzed for the teams over those dates.

Then all of the men’s teams average retweets and favorites were compiled, and the same

was done for the women’s teams as well. The average engagement of the top two mens
and womens teams with the best records were entered into a table for comparison, and

the same model was applied for the teams with the worst records as well.

Analysis

ACC Men’s Teams Records, Average Retweet, and Average Favorite Counts

Team Conference Overall AVG RT Count AVG Favorite Count

#4 FSU 16-4 26-5 38 248
#16 UVA 15-5 23-7 14 98
#14 Louisville 15-5 24-7 74 527
#11 Duke 15-5 25-6 211 1268
GT 11-9 17-14 12 83
NC State 10-10 20-12 24 195
Notre Dame 10-10 20-12 25 237
Syracuse 10-10 18-14 23 187
Clemson 9-11 16-15 22 174
Miami 7-13 15-16 11 64
BC 7-13 13-19 4 32
VT 7-13 16-16 10 92
Pitt 6-14 16-17 19 151
UNC 6-14 14-19 102 639
WF 6-14 13-18 10 58
40 270
Average ACC Men's
The men’s team with the most number of retweets was not the number one seed team in

the conference, but rather the number 4 team, Duke. Something to note about that, is

that Duke had a tweet go “viral” after a game against N.C. State. The tweet, which was a

retweet from SportsCenter, was a top 10 play and garnered 6,044 retweets and 41,472

favorites. This outlier had an effect on the data because without it, Duke Men’s team

would have had an average of 199 retweets and 1183 favorites. However, it was not
significant enough of an effect to change the outcome; even without the viral tweet,

Duke still leads in engagement.

The men’s team with the lowest average fan engagement wasn’t the lowest seed (Wake

Forest), but rather Boston College, which was seeded at 11.

ACC Women’s Teams Records, Average Retweet, and Average Favorite Counts

Team Conference Overall AVG RT Count AVG Favorite Count

#6 Louisville 16-2 28-4 14 124
#8 NC State 14-4 28-4 6 62
Duke 12-6 18-12 15 148
#19 FSU 11-7 24-8 4 28
VT 11-7 21-9 5 52
BC 11-7 20-12 3 25
GT 10-8 20-11 4 28
Syracuse 9-9 16-15 6 39
UVA 8-10 13-17 3 19
Notre Dame 8-10 13-18 6 81
UNC 7-11 16-14 9 84
Miami 7-11 15-15 3 20
WF 7-11 16-16 3 20
Clemson 3-15 8-23 3 26
Pitt 1-17 5-26 2 13
Average ACC Women's 6 51

The women’s team with the highest average of fan engagement was Duke, ranked #3 in

the conference. It is interesting that this matches the men’s teams. The team with the

lowest averages of fan engagement was Pitt, which was also ranked last in the

conference.
Overall ACC Men’s and Women’s Average Retweet and Favorite Count

AVG RT AVG FAV

ACC Men 40 270
ACC Women 6 51

The most significant note here is that the men’s teams in the ACC generated over five

times as much average engagement as the women’s teams.

ACC Teams Best Records Average Retweet and Favorite Count

ACC Teams with Best Records

Team AVG RT Count AVG Favorite Count
FSU M 38 248
UVA M 14 98
Louisville W 14 124
NC State W 6 62

The ACC teams with the best records differed for men’s and women’s. FSU’s men’s team

best represents the average amount of engagement with men’s ACC teams. NC State’s

women’s team is closer to the model of the average amount of engagement with

women’s ACC teams. It is interesting that UVA’s men’s team falls far below the men’s

overall average, and that Louisville’s women’s team is far above the women’s overall

average.

ACC Teams Worst Records Average Retweet and Favorite Count

ACC Teams with Worst Records

Team AVG RT Count AVG Favorite Count
UNC M 102 639
WF M 10 58
Clemson 3 26
Pitt 2 13

UNC and WF have the lowest records among the men’s teams, and neither team

accurately represents the overall men’s averages. But UNC’s averages were above the

overall average, which is interesting. Both Clemson and Pitt fall below the averages of

the women’s teams.

Conclusions

Based on the data and analysis, our first hypothesis of women’s teams having less loyal

or interactive fans was partly correct. The worst women’s teams, Pitt and Clemson, both

had low averages, with Pitt being the lowest ranked and having the worst averages. But

Duke had the best averages, and was only seeded third in the conference. Therefore,

only part of our hypothesis was correct. As the teams got worse, they had less

engagement, but being better didn’t necessarily cause higher engagement from fans.

Our second hypothesis of the men’s teams being in a positive relationship wasn’t

correct. There was no distinctive evidence that as teams were seeded higher, they had

better averages, and that as teams got worse, they had worse averages. However, it was

interesting to note that major teams, like Duke and UNC, held higher averages. Duke

had the highest averages and was ranked 4th, and UNC had the second highest averages,

but was ranked 14th.

Discussions
The analysis of this research dictates multiple points. The first is that teams with long-

standing histories and a reputation for winning, will garner more fan engagement, even

with a losing season. Duke and UNC are two of the biggest names in college basketball

and all four teams had significant standings in engagement, regardless of record this

season. The second point is that winning teams, like NC State’s women’s team or UVA’s

men’s team, didn’t necessarily guarantee more fan engagement. There wasn’t a

significant standing for those averages, even though they were of the top four ranked

teams. The final point is that retweets from popular channels from accounts like

SportsCenter or ESPN may garner more engagement because there is a bigger and more

attracted audience to reach.

Overall, this study revealed that while record does have input on fan engagement with

teams, it is primarily the team’s history and reputation that plays more of a role.

Citations

1. Sports journalism. (n.d.). Retrieved from

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sports_journalism

2. Sports on Television. (2020, April 2). Retrieved from

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-

books/sports-television

3. Harris, N. (2014, October 14). The impact of social and digital media on sport. Retrieved

from https://www.latrobe.edu.au/nest/the-impact-of-social-and-digital-media-on-sport/