Great content provides a compelling narrative giving the reader a reason to read on. In most cases, unique content wins the day. Creating unique content in a fragmented landscape is difficult as people have more choice with less time to read. So how do you stand out?
If you’re a Sports fan you’re hit with breaking news on Twitter and a constant stream of personalized news stories about your favourite team direct to your Facebook page.
Now, you could spend you’re time hacking new approaches of getting traffic to your news site. Another approach is to provide content so compelling that it attracts a highly relevant audience.
Emotional analysis provides a way to detect when people express opinions online which can be classified as emotional states such as ‘angry’, ‘sad’ or ‘joyful’.
So let’s look at how emotional analysis, as a way to tell your readers something they didn’t know. That’s exactly what we did with SBNation.com, one of the most popular US sports sites by tracking the emotional highs and lows of a college basketball game, which generated over 21,500 page views in a matter of hours, a massive increase from its 3,700 monthly page views average per story for March 2016.
The focus for the analysis was the epic last minute come back for college basketball team Texas A&M versus Northern Iowa in the NCAA Tournament. We created a Fan Index to compare how fans of Texas A&M reacted throughout the game versus a local rival University of Texas.
Writing on SB Nation Dr Scott Davies showed how the emotions for when Texas A&M when doing badly were most positive by supporters of University of Texas. In the last 30 seconds the game was reversed by a last minute come back by Texas A&M.
Here is a sample of posts, sent out during the final 30 seconds:
University of Texas during the last 30 seconds
Fan Reaction Index (-11)
Bull**** call
You gotta be kidding me
HOLY **** THEY”RE GONNA **** UNI
SEC sec SEC SEC SEC SEC SEC
Stupid UNI
How is that a foul?
That foul call was bull$#@! though.
****.
Such bull****.
jesus christ
This is the worst meltdown in tournament history.
Aggies during the last 30 seconds
Fan Reaction Index (+12)
Holy mother of god
HOLY ****!!!
USA!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!
Holy! ****!
I CANNOT EFFINNN BELIEVE THIS
OMG **** I’m drunk I don’t know what I’m watching
OMG….ill eat all that crow if we pull this off
