Social Media Meets March Madness

March Madness has arrived and unlike many years before, this year March Madness has taken over the lives of its fans and also their social media accounts.

Selection Sunday, the day where picked teams and their seeds are announced, started most of the Twitter talk about March Madness. Fans mainly started tweeting two hours leading up to the announcement of which teams would be picked for the tournament. Iona received the most tweets with almost 12,000 mentions in a two hour span of time. Iona was not the only team that was tweeted about. This year, unlike many others, March Madness and social media became much more interactive. Fans created team and player hashtags, tweeted to players and began live tweeting scores and comments during games. Players even tweeted back to fans and thanked them!

For the first time this year, there was also a March Madness social winner. A research group at communications agency Schwartz MSL created a formula to see which school had the most tuned in social media fan. The formula took the combined followers of a school’s team on Facebook and Twitter, and then divided that number by the total student body population. The Kansas Jayhawks were the winners of this bracket. Why did such a smaller school like Kansas, with a little over 20,000 undergrad students, beat out such a large school like Ohio, that has over 43,000 undergrad students? Mostly because when you have such a large school like Ohio it is hard for all students to be as interactive on social media, unlike a smaller school like Kansas.

Interested in knowing which team is being talked about most currently on social media? Mashable.com provides mRank. mRank calculates the amount of buzz that a particular topic has on the social web by analyzing conversations across Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Mashable has dedicated a whole selection to the buzz for March Madness teams here.

Hopefully, your top bracket choice has a lot of buzz! Are you participating in March Madness via your social media accounts? Let us know!

This guest blog was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member Jackie Grillo.