Indian Premier League (IPL), Cricket, Online Social Media

In recent past online social media has played a pivotal role in sharing of information and opinions on real time events. Events in physical space are reflected in digital world through online social networks. Event based studies for such content have been widely done on Twitter in the computer science community. In this report, we performed a detailed analysis of a sports event called the Indian Premier League (IPL’13) for both Facebook and Twitter. IPL is the most popular cricket league in India with players from across the world. We analysed more than 2.6 million tweets and 700 thousand Facebook posts for temporal activity, text quality, geography of users and the spot-fixing scandal which came up during the league. We were able to draw strong correlations between the brand value of teams and how much they were talked about on social media across Facebook and Twitter. Analysis of geo-tagged data showed major activity from metropolitan suburbs however activity was not restricted to the regions geographically associated with each team. We present a decay calculation methodology, using which we derive that activity died down on both Twitter and Facebook in a very similar manner. Such analysis can be used to model events and study their penetration in social networks. We analysed text for spot-fixing and found that user response to allegations about matches being fixed was cold. The complete analysis presented in this report, can be particularly useful for studying events involving crisis or events of political importance having similar structure.