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At a very special 2022 US Open, Serena Williams has been winning on the court, on television — and now on social media, according to new data.
Per information provided to Front Office Sports from Twitter, conversation on the app during the peak hour of Williams’ Wednesday night match — a three-set upset over No. 2 seed Anett Kontaveit — was 365% higher than the peak hour of the Tuesday night session.
The stats from her opening match Monday night were impressive, but Wednesday’s thriller drove even more traffic to the app: Conversation during the second-round match window was 45% higher than the first, and 60% higher during the peak hour.
Perhaps most interestingly, SerenaMania is attracting new fans to Tennis Twitter.
Thirty percent of users who tweeted about Williams in August had not tweeted about tennis all year — and 67% had not tweeted about Serena herself all year.
For the occasion of her final career tournament, Twitter released an exclusive goat hashmoji — an honor the social media company has only bestowed upon a select group that includes Tom Brady, Simone Biles, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi.
- The three hashmojis are among the top five most used hashtags in Serena conversations during the tournament.
- #serenawilliams and #serena are two of the top three hashtags used in all tennis conversations globally during the US Open.
- The data also speaks to Williams’ global appeal — 47% of the tweets using them came from outside the United States.
- Four of the top five most retweeted tweets since the Open started are about Serena — including a quote tweet about Tiger Woods’ presence at Wednesday’s match (56.1K retweets and 462.2K likes).
Williams’ popularity on the app is helping drive the conversation as well.
Even with more than 10.7 million followers, Serena ranked among the top 20 women athletes with the most new followers last year.
