NFL twitter sentimentThe Wall Street Journal published an article featuring the research of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School Marketing Professors Mike Lewis and Manish Tripathi.

The two researchers recently measured the average Twitter sentiment after a game for the 32 NFL fan bases. They analyzed the sentiment of NFL fans by accessing millions of Twitter conversations from the day(s) after the teams played in the regular season. On their blog site, “Emory Sports Marketing Analytics” they explain their method.

“We used Twitter data to describe fan base reactions to team wins and losses during the sixteen-game 2012 NFL Regular season. Our process for data collection can be illustrated with an example using the Buffalo Bills.  Imagine that the Bills played a game on a Sunday. We recorded whether the Bills won or lost the game. We then collected all tweets in the Buffalo area that mentioned the words ‘Buffalo Bills,’ ‘Bills,’ or other very frequent terms used to describe the team. We collected the tweets from Monday (one day after the game), Tuesday (two days after the game), and Wednesday (three days after the game). We then analyzed each tweet and characterized its content as positive or negative. Next, we calculated the overall sentiment (roughly the indexed ratio of positive to negative tweets) of the Buffalo Bills related tweets for each of the three days. We repeated this process for all thirty-two teams, and for all regular season games.”

The blog post also ranks the teams for happiness after a win, sadness after a loss, and stability.

View the results and read more on the Emory Sports Marketing Analytics blog.