This Super Bowl Sunday, I’m excited that I’ll attend a Super Bowl watch party – dressed in my Eagles gear hoping that the Eagles can bring home the Super Bowl. I’ll admit that it’s a welcome break from my usual friendly debates that surround soccer (football to the rest of the world) vs. “American” football.
Although I’m not originally from Philadelphia, it’s been my home for many years now, and the excitement level of the die-hard Eagles fans are sometimes obnoxious, but mostly infectious. How can you not root for the underdogs? Even when the Eagles was not Super Bowl bound, Eagles fans would share as much enthusiasm about their team’s prospects in the league.
There’s been a longstanding debate on if Philadelphia Eagles fans are truly one of the most die-hard, dedicated fans ever. As a result, we decided to put this theory to the test using our social sentiment analysis tool. Click here to see the Excitement Challenge update for today.
The Excitement Challenge Hypothesis
As with any study, we had to come up with a hypothesis. The hypothesis was to prove or disprove the following:
Philadelphia Eagles fans are die-hard fans that can’t contain their excitement. Hence, they are more excited about the Super Bowl.
The Social Sentiment Tool Setup
Although we are a Philadelphia based company rooting for the Eagles to bring the Super Bowl title home, we wanted our analysis to be unbiased. So, over the next few days leading up to the Super Bowl, we are tracking the excitement levels of the Patriots and Eagles fans.
Tracked Keywords
To ensure that we have access to a good sampling of data, we are tracking most of the popular keywords either associated with the Super Bowl or the individual teams.
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Our list of tracked keywords include:
@Eagles @NFL @Patriots #FlyEaglesFly #Eagles #DillyDilly #PhillyPhilly #BirdGang #DogsGottaEatAgain #Underdogs #Patriots #PatriotsNation #NotDone #GOAT #GoPats #TB12 #NotMySuperbowl #SBLII #SB52 #Super Bowl #PHIvsNE #NEvsPHI
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Sentiment Scores
The Arkieva Sentiment Analysis Tool assigns a score to each tweet received for the tracked keywords or hashtags, and then, assigns a positive or negative sentiment score based on the tone of the message. The sentiment scores rank from 0.1 – 0.9. The closer you get to 1.0, the more positive the message is deemed. I was pleased by the accuracy of the tool’s sentiment analysis.
For instance, these posts for the Eagles had a positive score closer to 0.8-0.9, and all showed a positive sentiment.
Similarly, the Patriots had positive tweets with equally high sentiment scores like these:
Determining the winning team for each day
Now that we had our data setup it was time to do the fun part by setting our rules to determine the winner.
To win:
- A team had to reach the mark of 1000 posts within the given day
- And should have a sentiment score of 0.6 and above
Meaning all tweets that receive a sentiment score below 0.6 don’t count towards the challenge for the day.
Why not use an average sentiment level?
Since the average sentiment level is calculated looking at both low and high sentiment score tweets, we felt that it didn’t depict the true excitement level. Fans on opposing teams could publish posts that would have a low sentiment score in hopes of getting the other team’s average down.
Here’s what our finished dashboard looks like:
Arkieva Sentiment Analysis Tool for the Super Bowl #SuperBowlExcitementChallenge
Clearly, at the time of this screenshot the Eagles were in the lead, but check our Super Bowl tracking page to see daily results. Be sure to share your excitement with your team using #SuperBowlExcitementChallenge for a chance to win a free Eagles shirt or click to enter here.
May the better team win! Which team are you rooting for?
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