The March Madness winner is Duke (according to the data)
How is your NCAA Men’s basketball tournament bracket doing after the first day of games? Not great? You may be in the same boat as a lot of people who didn’t see the 11 and 12 seeds picking up wins. There’s a great deal of science in predicting the winners in the tournament — but sometimes that doesn’t translate to wins on the court — and the commensurate craziness on social media underscored how exciting the tournament can be.
And if you picked Duke to win it all, you’re not alone.
Blue Fountain Media decided to look off the court and analyzed Facebook, Instagram and Twitter team accounts (basketball teams only — not fan pages, the university itself, etc.) to see how their audiences engaged with them on social media. Average engagement rates across each social platform were considered first — and based on a large sampling of pages and posts specific to college basketball, they came up with a formula for each individual channel to determine their average engagement rates.
According to their data, the Blue Devils (who beat my beloved Oregon Ducks in this experiment) will overcome the Kentucky Wildcats and be cutting down the digital nets at the end of the tournament.
Now, we’ll just have to see how it all actually plays out on the court.
