Study Shows Which Wimbledon Players Were Most-Mentioned Positively On Twitter

IBM and Meltwater Buzz analysts have been monitoring online reactions to the 2012 Wimbledon Championships to find out "which players are most admired on social media platforms" according to the London GUARDIAN. They used sentiment analysis - a form of measuring whether a message uses generally positive or negative language - to see not only which players were mentioned most, "but whether the dialogue was overly positive or negative." IBM analysed almost 3 million tweets throughout the tournament. Despite winning the tournament, Roger Federer and Serena Williams did not win in the Twittosphere, placing fourth and third respectively. The study also measured the athletes' overall sentiment (positive tweets minus negative tweets, both as percentages of all mentions). Andy Murray's 33% ranked him in the top spot. Rafael Nadal "came third in terms of volume of tweets," but his "shock loss to Lukas Rosol left him with net negative sentiment." Williams scored a higher positive rating than any other male or female player in the tournament with a sentiment score of 55%. In addition, Wimbledon's busiest day on Twitter came when Nadal was knocked out, with 209,619 tweets, and within the U.K., only 13% of the tournament's positive tweets came from Scotland (GUARDIAN, 7/10).