Thursday, March 13, 2014

Social Media Stats Illustrate the Cheltenham Buzzfest

Yesterday we spoke about how racing in the UK had to mature to an effective marketing and betting industry much faster than here across the pond. It's sink or swim and has been that way since virtually inception.

Because of that the culture and racing's willingness to fight for market share (spending more time on the product than, for example, adding alternative gaming) some of their big events are not only big, they're huge. It didn't happen by accident.

Case in point, the Cheltenham Festival.

Via Social Mention, these stats (to the left) are quite good.  The racing is over right now, but we are seeing one mention each minute. The passion level of 49% is a good number. You can see tweets by searching for the hashtag #cheltenhamfestival.

Next up, we look at sentiment a little deeper in the following couple of graphs. 

Most of the tweets are scatter-plotted around differing sentiments. These sentiments range from "Excited" to "Happy" to "Pleasant" to "Alert"to "Elated"


These folks are watching racing, and they are betting racing, but they are one happy group.

Next, the related word cloud.


Notice the difference compared to, say, a Kentucky Derby over here?

"Matched" refers to being matched on a betting exchange on a horse. "Bet" and "Win"seems self-explanatory.  Few tweets about horses, trainers, riders. There are a lot of gambling hashtags, though. 

Like we've spoken about here, and you've seen elsewhere, like was echoed by Gibson Carothers at Thoroughbred Commentary last week: By selling betting, you are selling the sport. What do we think people all doing all day at the Cheltenham Festival, just modeling hats?

Racing has had some serious problems in North America, but when you look at the above, one may think it has a tremendous upside. Watching the tweets shows just how infectious a betting and racing event is.



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