This weekend, we head into the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA March Madness tournament. As with years past, at this point in the tournament, one or more upsets have shaken up the brackets, creating new contenders for the tournament champions and lighting up social media. In the men’s Eastern bracket so far this year, we’ve seen 1-seed Villanova overtaken by “Giant Killer” Wisconsin, and 7-seed South Carolina unseating the 5-time NCAA champion Duke Blue Devils. In the women’s bracket, there are fewer upsets so far this year, except 10-seed Oregon beating out Duke in the last round; they’ll play 3-seed Maryland in the next game.
Die-hard (and fickle) fans across the country can get engaged with their favorite March Madness teams across a number of different platforms – while TV has been the traditional platform for watching games, in the past few years, live streaming via the NCAA website and app has increased in popularity.
As with other sporting events, teams, athletes, and fans engage on social media, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat. Key hashtags associated with the tournament trend during the period – #MarchMadness, #Sweet16, #EliteEight, #FinalFour – which comes as no surprise, as sports fans are 67% more likely to post to Twitter than non-sports fans.
Publishers wanting to engage with fans to give them more complete coverage of the NCAA March Madness tournament employ social media curation to bring the best of fan, team, and athlete content from across the social web directly onto their site. Profanity filtering, and white- and blacklisting, ensure the content in the stream is family-friendly. Social media curation can even help cover lower division tournaments, providing broader coverage of college sports without the overhead of having reporters at every event. You can use citizen reporters – fans, friends, team accounts – to document events on and off the court.
We’ve compiled a sample social stream to give you a taste of what’s possible.
Contact us today to learn more and get a safe, relevant, and real-time social stream – about March Madness, sports, or any topic you and your readers prefer.