It is NBA draft week and while the Internet floods feeds with mock drafts from experts, we wondered what do fans think? Which players do they want their favorite teams to select?
To gauge this, Sports Illustrated paired with the Robert H. Brooks Sports Science Institute and the Social Media Listening Center at Clemson University. The SMLC monitors social media conversations from across the web, utilizing its software to convey, measure and analyze trends, sentiment, geo-location data and more to provide an acute understanding of social chatter.
As part of this project, students and faculty at the university’s SMLC tracked NBA draft conversations across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for six weeks, monitoring fans’ usage of team hashtags, mentions and social media handles to attempt to get an appropriate representation of each fan base’s top targets leading into the draft.