Two of the National Basketball Association’s marquee franchises are moving in starkly different directions when it comes to movement in people talking about this on Facebook for the past week, according to sister page PageData, as the defending champions, the Miami Heat, nearly doubled the PTAT gain of its nearest competitor, while the Los Angeles Lakers, after barely qualifying for the playoffs and being swept out of the first round, lost more than double the PTAT of the next team on the list.
Lisa Raphael (left), the social media producer at Katie Couric's daytime talk show Katie, is one of our featured speakers in Mediabistro's upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an online event and workshop starting June 6, 2013. Lisa will share a case study on how the hit show uses Twitter to build interest and buzz around upcoming segments. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
The defending National Basketball Association champions are also this week’s champions in terms of people talking about this, as sister page PageData pegged the Miami Heat’s PTAT for the week at 345,333, dwarfing the total of the second-place club, the Los Angeles Lakers, at 210,817.
With the Final Four teams set for the 2013 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, the Sports on Facebook page offered a look at counties in the U.S. that back Louisville, Michigan, Syracuse, and Wichita State.
When little-known Florida Gulf Coast University became the first No. 15 seed to reach the Sweet 16 round in the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship tournament, Facebook users took notice. The Eagles are the most-talked-about remaining college hoops team in the U.S., with fellow underdog Wichita State taking second place. However, in terms of Facebook page popularity, blue bloods Indiana, Kansas, Duke, and Michigan are among the most-liked.
SocialCode wasn’t the only company to use Facebook data as part of its methodology for selecting the winner of the 2013 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship tournament and select Duke: Facebook itself chose the Blue Devils, as well, filling out its bracket based on participating teams’ buzz on the social network over the past two weeks.
The 2013 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship tournament tips off later Tuesday night, and fans throughout the country are using various strategies to fill out their brackets, as is social marketing solutions provider SocialCode, which used its own algorithm to determine that Duke will cut down the nets April 8.
Sunday, 68 teams will be selected to play in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship tournament — a time of year known as March Madness. Monday, people all over the country will be filling out brackets in office pools, picking the winners of all of those college basketball games. But with dozens of games going on, how can the casual fan keep track? There are some great Facebook-integrated applications that allow fans to get closer to the game, whether they’re following their alma maters, or just seeing if their brackets will survive the first round.
On Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens will meet in New Orleans for Super Bowl XLVII — a topic already hugely popular on Facebook. The 49ers, led by quarterback Colin Kaepernick, are the most-talked-about team on the social network by far. However, the two fan bases have a few things in common on Facebook.
Professional sports teams and leagues are as focused on Facebook and other social media as businesses from other sectors are, and an all-star team of social media executives from the field joined moderator and Movement Strategy Co-Founder Jason Mitchell on a panel at the AllFacebook Marketing Conference in New York Wednesday, “How Professional Sports Are Monetizing through Facebook.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban used his blog on The Huffington Post to clarify his thoughts on Facebook and his dissatisfaction with the social network’s page algorithm, saying that Facebook is behaving more like a search engine in trying to deliver content to its users’ news feeds based on relevancy and engagement.
