Cricket World Cup: What Twitter has told us so far

With one of the worlds most viewed sporting events soon coming to a close, we here at Pulsar wanted to find out more into what exactly people talk about during the Cricket World Cup?

Over the past month, we’ve been tracking all online Twitter content around the relevant Cricket World Cup hashtags including:

#cwc15, #cwc2015, #cricketworldcup

So what have we been learning so far? The first thing is that we wanted to know if the flagship event of the international cricket calendar would also see high amounts of chatter online… and indeed it does.

With lots of fluctuations in daily online conversation, we noticed two evident spikes in conversation since the start of the world cup:

February 15^th: conversation was high when the world cup began

February 22^nd: conversation spiking again during the following matches

• Afghanistan vs. Sri Lanka
• India Vs. South Africa

So besides people using the Cricket World Cup hashtags on Twitter to get their voice heard, what else is this global audience talking about?

With lots of match and game terminology, we noticed that India, England and Ireland are mentioned among the top conversations. Although does that necessarily mean that people within those countries were contributing to the Cricket World Cup conversation?

England and India were actually among the top 5 countries around the world creating the most conversation about the Cricket World Cup but what about Ireland? Although the country itself is mentioned a lot online in relation to the cup, Ireland itself lands at only the 16^th spot of top country talking about the World Cup online.

Some might wonder who was ruling this conversation and reaching the biggest audience online?

The top 10 Twitter users talking about the Cricket World Cup are global or regional news or informative sites giving the audience real time cricket updates and tips for things to watch.

Before we started to research the Cricket World Cup on Twitter, we read an article reviewing the top players to watch out for. This got us to thinking if there was any correlation between the top players and people talking about them online?

Not to our surprise, there actually was a lot of conversation about the athletes that naturally occurred in relation to the Cricket World Cup. However it’s clear that AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli are the online fan favourites.

With the end of the Cricket World Cup creeping up on us, we will again be taking a look at the online conversation once the cup comes to an end on March 28^th.  So keep on eye on this space for our second Twitter analysis of the World Cup.

If you'd like to find out how you can use Pulsar to track major sporting events on Twitter, or you'd just like a demo, please email: [email protected].