A few weeks ago as the baseball playoffs were just starting we did a post over on the Marketwired blog showing off the social chatter around all eight teams that were heading into the post-season.
Now, the playoffs are done and we’re heading into the World Series. Starting tomorrow the Boston Red Sox will be playing the St Louis Cardinals for the rights to be the 2013 MLB champions. We’ll have some more about these two teams when we put out our Social Media Guide to The World Series.
Today, we wanted to explore which series attracted more social media attention, the American League Championship Series (ALCS) or the National League Championship Series (NLCS). To do so, we looked up the two terms using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software. For this search we decided to leave out the names of the teams playing and just focus on the actual series themselves.
Between the two terms we found over 1 million mentions. However, when we split the two we found that the ALCS was mentioned just slightly more than the NLCS. The NCLS was mentioned 427,406 times across social channels making up 47% of the conversation, while the ALCS was mentioned 490,473 times making up the other 53%.
In fact, when we looked at the social channels broken down we found that the ALCS was talked about more everywhere except for in the news. We found that online news articles seem to have more to say when it came to the National League. And by quite a bit. On blogs, in forums and on Twitter the ALCS was talked about more by up to 10%, but in the news where the NLCS was mentioned more often it was by 16%. It appears there was more “news” to cover on the National League side.
We looked at the mentions spread out over the post season as well. What we found here was something interesting. The accronyms didn’t appear the most when each championship was actually won. Instead they appeared the most on the first games of the final rounds of the ALCS and NLCS playoffs. On the first night of the ALCS, the Detroit Tigers almost went an entire night without giving up a hit (they let a single get hit with one out in the 9th). That obviously garnered a lot of attention. The first NLCS game was also an interesting one as it went into 13 innings before the St Louis Cardinals won.
Finally, we compared the sentiment between the two series. While the ALCS may have been talked about more than the NLCS, they both attracted an equal amount of negative talk. Both the ALCS and the NLCS had 24% of the talk about them show as negative. However, the NLCS had 28% of its conversations show as positive while the ALCS had 24%.
