March Madness has been my favorite time of year for as long as I can remember. I’m not exactly sure why, but I just love the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. And to make it even better, I can incorporate my love of social media into the event. More than ever before, social media has made it incredibly easy to follow March Madness 2015. Selection Sunday is March 15th and the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament gets underway with the First Round games on Tuesday March 17th and Wednesday March 18th in Dayton, Ohio.
This is the third year I've attempted to produce your Go-To Digital Guide to March Madness.
Every year there are millions of people who come down with an illness requiring them to stay home from work during the tournament. We've all seen the articles describing in great detail the time we spend watching games, attending parties and pretending to work while we watch games and catch up on scores with our smartphones, tablets and computers. Here at The Friedman Group we're all about the tournament and I'm just hoping to get a couple hours of work in every day until April 6th when it's all over.
If last year is any indication, this year should be crazy. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports that total March Madness mentions in 2014 were 5,583,821 or 253,810 mentions per day! Total mentions of Targeted Brands during March Madness was 69,340.
Will Someone Make Warren Buffett Pony Up?
Again this year, there’s talk Warren Buffet is teaming up with Quicken Loans and Yahoo Sports to offer the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge again. Feeling lucky? All you have to do is be the first person in history to submit a perfect bracket to win the billion dollars. Not feeling so lucky. The 20 highest scoring imperfect brackets won $100,000 last year and that’s nothing to sneeze at. We don’t know what Mr. Buffett has planned for this year but after the tournament last year he told Dan Patrick, “Wait ‘til next year. We’ll make it a lot easier to enter. There were some questions that were a little tough, I thought (in terms of signing up). We’ll make it easier to win, but I think we’ll have an exciting prize.”
March Madness And Social: A Match Made In Heaven
College basketball fans around the world rely on social media to keep up with their favorite teams. And when they can't watch the games live, they can keep up with the action just by looking at their smartphone or tablet and checking their favorite social network. Here's some ways you can stay engaged with the NCAA Tournament while remaining mobile.
YouTube is serving up March Madness to the masses in the form of short clips of game highlights and recaps of all 67 games, which will be made available as part of a new NCAA March Madness channel. The channel will also give us live streams from press conferences, as well as game previews and news. Viewers won't be able to see live streams of the games on YouTube. We'll still have to rely on CBS and Turner for that.
This year, the NCAA March Madness Live app will broadcast live games. Games broadcast on CBS can be seen on the app and Saturday’s Final Four games (televised on TBS and TNT this year) will also be available online and on your mobile device via the NCAA March Madness Live app.
There are lots of ways to keep up with the Tournament scores, including the ESPN SportsCenter app on iTunes and for Android devices. ESPN will also have a large web presence during the tournament with a number of pages dedicated to March Madness.
You're going to find Facebook pages dedicated to March Madness and Pinterest boards for the visual amongst us. YouTube will also be filled with highlight clips throughout the Tournament.
Interested in filling out a bracket or hosting your own competition? There are many options to choose from including the bracket challenge hosted by CBSSports and the NCAA’s interactive bracket to name just two.
Twitter is going to be twitterpating with March Madness info and millions will be using and following the #MarchMadness, #ESPN, #CBSSports and #NCAA hashtags to keep up with everything they can. For some of the best tournament information, I'd suggest you have a look at @MarchMadnessTV the official home of March Madness TV, TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV.
Some Of My Other Favorite People And Teams To Follow On Social Media Are:
- ESPN Basketball Insider Jeff Goodman @GoodmanESPN.
- Being a student of history and a fan of Duke basketball I follow @dukeblueplanet to keep up with everything Blue Devil.
- This year there are over 135,000 people following Kentucky basketball.
- I can't mention Duke basketball without mentioning another one of my favorite teams, the Kansas Jayhawks. Follow Kansas Basketball at @KUHoops and “Rock Chalk Jayhawks!”
- Jay Bilas is an ESPN Analyst, former Duke player and President of Hair Club for Men. Follow him at @JayBilas to get his take on the tournament.
- Rob Dauster @RobDauster is the Senior Writer for NBCSports.com’s college hoops coverage at College Basketball Talk and always has some great insight to share.
- ESPN.com Senior Writer Andy Katz @ESPNAndyKatz covers college basketball for ESPN while populating his Twitter stream with the day's breaking news, trivia and his own analysis.
- The NCAA is on Google+ and Instagram.
- There’s Yahoo! expert Brad Evans and Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Eisenberg
- College hoops reporter / analyst / author for Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports Seth Davis @SethDavisHoops believes “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.”
- Need some serious stats on your favorite team? Check out Sports Illustrated and SI.com writer Luke Winn @lukewinn. The guy is a statistics machine!
- While we're talking about statistics gurus, check out Ken Pomeroy @kenpomeroy for team metrics and statistical analysis you're not likely to find elsewhere.
By no means is this an exhaustive list of March Madness social media sites. It's just some of my personal favorites. I'd love to hear from you in the comments below! Tell me who you follow on any of the social networks to get your March Madness fix. I’d love to add your info to my 2016 March Madness post.
Do you have something to add to this post? Please share it in the comments.
