Laura Robson and Andy Murray at Wimbledon spark positivity on Twitter
The British pair have been the subject of some rare good nature from tweeters, with Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer the most talked about players of the Championships
In the age of social media everyone has an outlet for opinion and when it comes to Wimbledon, we Brits are known to get pretty fired up. So it comes as no surprise that analysis of the scores of tweets sent out during the first week of competition at SW19 shows our remaining hopefuls Andy Murray and Laura Robson are amongst the most talked about players on Twitter.
But in addition to their notable playing abilities, the pair have topped a list of competitors generating the most positive sentiment on the social networking site. As of Friday, 44% of the 41,896 tweets about Robson were in her favour, a figure likely to have grown since her dramatic three-set win over Marina Erakovic on Saturday, with 50% of her mentions regarded neutral and a lowly 7% deemed negative.
British title hopeful Murray - who has famously generated a mixed response from home fans in the past - comes second in the standings with 37% of his 73,569 mentions coming back positive, 52% neutral and just 7% negative.
Robson's first round opponent Maria Kirilenko ranks third, with 36% of tweets about her coming back positive, while Lleyton Hewitt's plucky second round conqueror Dustin Brown is rewarded for his phenomenal tennis by a fourth place finish at 35% positive tweets. Veteran Australian Hewitt - playing his 15th Wimbledon this year - rounds off the top five with 33% of his mentions deemed positive.
The week's most tweeted about players are those who have suffered major upsets in the early stages, with Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer topping the men's ranks, generating 108,565 and 84,385 tweets respectively followed by Andy Murray in third. Maria Sharapova precedes Robson and Serena Williams as the most talked about women's player with 59,240 mentions. Reigning champion and world number one Williams has 40,110 with fourth-placed Azarenka prompting just 15,213 tweets.
As of Friday, 1,386,296 tweets had been sent about the Championships with the word "ball" topping the Wimbledon trends at 7,618 mentions, succeeded by "strawberry" (7,342), "scream" (6,313), "rain" (5,899) and "British" (3,652).
The Twitter study was carried out by IBM whose social sentiment index reveals the highs and lows of the Wimbledon Championships through in-depth analysis of tweets.
Coverage of today's action at Wimbledon is shown on BBC2 from 11:30am and BBC1 from 1:45pm
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