Constructor Technology | Social media insights for sport teams

Overview:

Rolos by Constructor is a company specializing in Machine Intelligence consulting services, focusing on driverless mobility, robotics, and professional sports. The company aimed to explore how sports teams could leverage their social media presence to enhance fan engagement and growth.

Project goals:

• Evaluate the social media presence of a football team.
• Segment the fan base.
• Provide recommendations for increasing and engaging with fans.

The approach:

Naemi, Joana, and Mihaela chose Manchester United for their analysis due to its robust social media presence. They decided to focus on Twitter as the primary platform because of its accessible data via API. While they attempted to gather data from other social media platforms, they faced challenges due to limited API accessibility and insufficient data availability. Despite these hurdles, the team successfully collected tweets and other relevant data through the Twitter API.

Manchester United boasts nearly 34 million followers on Twitter. Collecting data from all users within the available timeframe was impractical, so the students concentrated on analyzing tweets instead of user profiles directly. By using Manchester United-related hashtags, they gathered around 1.4 million tweets over six months, generated by approximately 138,000 unique users. Both the tweets and the users who posted them became the focus of their analysis. See graph below:


The graph above shows different topics created with the BERTopic model.

Methodology:

The team employed various tools like snscrape, Tweepy, and Twython to gather and process the data. They used techniques such as text preprocessing and data wrangling, followed by sentiment analysis with TextBlob, topic modeling, and user segmentation using BERTopic. While other NLP techniques like LDA and word2vec were explored, they proved less effective for this particular study.

Key insights:

The BERTopic model revealed various topics, such as a significant spike in social media activity on August 22, 2022, corresponding to a match against Liverpool. By using a range of models and tools, the students uncovered interesting insights about the Manchester United fan base, identifying trending topics and keywords that generated high engagement. Their methodology and findings can serve as a framework for similar social media analyses across various platforms.

This project demonstrates the potential of social media analytics in helping sports teams understand and engage their fan base more effectively, offering valuable strategies to enhance their online presence and connection with supporters.

 

Conclusion:

This project highlights the power of data science in transforming the way sports teams engage with their fan base, uncovering valuable insights that can drive success both on and off the field. If this work inspires you and want to explore a career in data science, consider learning more about the data science program offered by Constructor Academy. This program equips you with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in the rapidly growing field of data science. Check out the Data Science Program to find out more and take the first step towards your future in data science!