The catch phrases alone are enough to make basketball fans giddy with excitement.
But recently the NCAA basketball tournament has made the hearts of a different population flutter — top brand marketers.
The NCAA tournament has become big business, and has grown even larger as social media has begun to play a part. Can’t watch the game live? Forget DVRing it to watch later. Most fans are streaming on a mobile device or watching it unfold through tweets and status updates on Twitter and Facebook.
The social media audience has become so large, in fact, that it rivals the audience watching the game live on traditional TV. Last year an estimated 7.7 million unique social media users made comments during the live broadcasts. And, even more telling for business, the NCAA estimates that there were 1.5 BILLION conversations online about the 2013 tourney, and that number is only expected to grow this year.
We’re especially excited for the tournament here at Social5, because one of our own will be seeing post-season play. Standout guard Tyler Haws of BYU is the son of the head of our sales division, Marty Haws (who made quite the name for himself in college hoops back in the day!).
We’ll all be cheering Tyler and all the players in the tournament on, but we certainly won’t be alone. BYU Basketball has 13,000 followers on Twitter, and they are a fairly small school. Traditional power house Duke has more than 77,000 followers, and the official NCAA stream has nearly 200,000! They are just a few of the thousand reasons social media is changing March Madness as we know it.
