Chelsea Varney is a Community Manager for Brandwatch, a social media monitoring company. You can catch her on the company’s blog as well as her Twitter page.

Regardless of whether a team is soaring high in the league or failing miserably, you can be certain of one thing, fans will be discussing each match online.

The conversation on social media will always reflect the mood around a team, as fans don’t hold back when giving their opinions.

But how can marketers take this data and use it to their advantage?

Recently the performance of England’s rugby team has lead to frustration among their supporters. Last Saturday saw them experience their fifth defeat in a row against South Africa.

Over the course of the weekend the England rugby team were mentioned 6,445 times on Twitter, with the conversation peaking during the game on the 15^th November.

Interestingly, negative sentiment towards the team increased during the match and continued after the game had completed, demonstrating the fans’ frustration mounting.

It’s no surprise when looking at the data that England would suffer from negativity after a defeat.

But that isn’t the only data point intriguing insights can be drawn from. Looking at the people behind the tweets gives sponsors and advertisers an idea of the demographics behind those watching the game who are actively involved in a discussion.

Students were the top tweeters during the game when discussing the England team.

Are they the target audience for the England team sponsors or is it simply due to them being the most active on social?

A clear gender split was apparent in the England data with 79% of the mentions coming from men.

By comparison, Scotland’s mentions for their weekend game saw 38% of the tweets coming from women.

Could this indicate that Scottish women are more passionate about rugby than their English counterparts?

This type of demographic data helps to inform marketers or sponsors on what could be best placed in front of an audience watching the game.

Of course more in-depth research must be conducted to truly comprehend the audience, but social insights can certainly contribute to the process of understanding an active audience.

Being aware of the people behind the data is only the start of the interesting stats that can be gleaned from sports games.

For instance, looking at conversations surrounding the players can determine their popularity among the fans to help decide if they are worth the high level of sponsorships that they receive.

Are you interested in finding out how to use demographic data from sports fans for impactful campaigns? This recent case study on the World Cup data is certainly worth a read!