March Madness is the annual championship basketball tournament for teams in the top competitive tier of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the main governing body of college sports in the United States, as well as some schools in Canada.
Happening primarily during (you guessed it) March, the games draw millions of television viewers every year. This year’s women’s Final Four was ESPN’s most-watched ever, drawing 4.5 million viewers per game and rocketing to 9.9 million viewers for the final. On the men’s side, about 9.4 million people watched each of the semi-final games. (Final numbers for the men’s final were not yet released as of this writing.)
Here’s some of what our social and media intelligence analysis found about the online conversation about March Madness this year.