BBC Sport’s coverage of Wimbledon 2014 is the most comprehensive ever and can be accessed across all devices. There is generally a lot of Twitter traffic around one of Britain’s premier sporting events. Over the first week, there have been 918.55k tweets posted about Wimbledon 2014, of which 39% are positive, 14% are negative and 47% neutral.
As well as Blurrt collecting all tweets mentioning Wimbledon, we can also analyse the sentiment expressed within each tweet. We are interested in what people think about BBC Sport’s coverage this year which spans BBC1, BBC 2, the red button, 12 live streams on BBC Sport’s digital channel, on demand, Radio 5Live and a smartphone app.
For this blog, we have used the search terms BBC2+coverage thereby pulling tweets referring to it’s live coverage on BBC2 which includes Wimbedon 2014 from 11.30am – 8pm and Today at Wimbledon from 8pm – 9pm. The first few days of BBC2 coverage at Wimbledon had the most volume with around 3k tweets, then the volume decreased dramatically by 26th June. This would suggest a lot of reaction from the viewers to BBC Sport’s coverage as it started.
Overall the sentiment expressed during the week was positive, however if we drill down into the data for the 23rd, 24th and 25th of June, we can see a more volatile sentiment graph (see below).
Refining the search to tweets with a sentiment score of -2 or lower, we can pull out the really negative tweets from those few days and see what people are talking about in context of BBC2 and coverage. Here is a small selection of the 136 really negative tweets posted:
Here is a small selection of the 284 highly positive tweets:
Hope you find our insights into BBC Sports coverage of Wimbledon interesting so far. Watch out for insights into BBC red button, live streaming, and presenters throughout the next week.
Methodology
• All data in this report has been collected by Blurrt.
• Sentiment has been calculated using Blurrt’s exclusive linguistic resources and rules.
• All spam has been omitted from this analysis using Blurrt’s exclusive spam filter.
• Gender has been calculated by Blurrt based on a dictionary of over 140,000 gender names. “Other” gender refers to organisations and/or authors who do not provide gender information.
• All tweets referencing Wimbledon 2014 in the context of the above BBC Sport’s coverage were collected using a bespoke Twitter search query.