COLUMBIA, S.C. — Women’s basketball has been not just been the talk of the town, but also all across the nation. Interest in women’s college basketball reached a fever pitch as we went into the Gamecocks national championship game victory over Iowa.
“We’re in the Carolina community so mentions about the Gamecocks winning, there’s an outpour of them,” St Cyr Luttmer said.
Luttmer is the Social Media Insights Lab coordinator at the University of South Carolina, they've been tracking online posts mentioning the Gamecocks over the weekend.
“Just from Friday until today there’s been almost 200,000 posts and that’s just looking at terms that basically include national championship, women’s national championship. Over 200,000 posts which is extremely significant, almost 3 billion impressions on this post which impressions is basically an estimate of the number of people who have seen content or could’ve engaged with it,” Luttmer said.
Analysts say this is an increase from previous years.
“Definitely way less conversations in general. even when we won the national championship years ago with A'ja Wilson, just engagement in people talking about it was far less prominent. The overall number of mentions in the volume was far less than it is now. People are just talking about it more, they care about it more. women’s sports in general but also specifically women’s basketball,” Luttmer said.
A high number of engagement wasn’t only seen in content about the Gamecocks. The Iowa-Uconn national semifinal game Friday drew 14.2 million viewers, breaking a record for a women’s college basketball game that had been set just days earlier.
ESPN confirmed Monday that the national championship game between USC and Iowa was the most watched game women's college basketball game on record. The game had a total of 18.7 million viewers.
Basketball fans say social media allowed them to keep up with everything march madness related.
“I followed the news about the gamecocks a lot on Facebook. There were regular pictures, there were regular briefings about the games, keeping in line with scores and everything,” Haruna Moomin said.
Analyst say fans took to social media to show their support for the Gamecocks.
“With Columbia being very focused on USC just with the college being really central a lot of people want to talk about it and post about it because it’s something really special that the community is involved in,”