It's often said that Conor McGregor is the king of the PR game in mixed martial arts.

But is that really the case?

Apparently so. A social media study conducted by Colin Oliver of ORACLE this week gives plenty of evidence to back up the theory that McGregor is the top dog MMA social media circles.

McGregor's Social Media Footprint

The study found that over the course of a 12-month period (Aug 2015 - Aug 2016), McGregor was mentioned a staggering 6.4 million times across Twitter, in the news and on MMA-related blogs and forums. 




The mentions originated primarily from the US (46%), U.K. (20%), Canada (3.4%), Brazil (2.5%) and Australia (2.0%).





Looking at McGregor's online buzz across time, the biggest spike in mentions on a single day was generated on December 12th. That was the night he beat Jose Aldo to unify the UFC featherweight title. On that night alone, McGregor was mentioned 429,000 times.

Interestingly, both the UFC 196 and UFC 202 fights generated roughly the same amount of online buzz. Each received roughly 345,000 mentions.

Is McGregor Loved Or Hated Online? 

According to the NLP (Natural Language Processing) analysis, online sentiment for the Irishman was split down the middle with 18% of the 6.4 million mentions negative, 18% positive and the other 64% neutral (mostly news associated mentions).

Who Generates All These Mentions?

McGregor has a big online presence with 2.2 million Twitter followers, 6.2 million Instagram followers and 4.15 million Facebook followers. 

7 of his 10 most popular tweets in the last 12 months came from brash tweets from his owned Twitter profile, including the infamous "retirement" tweet that scored 161,953 retweets.

[tweet url=" https://twitter.com/thenotoriousmma/status/7224924..." hide_media="0" hide_thread="1"]

The other 3 most popular tweets were generated by One Direction's Niall Horan. Horan attended UFC 202 last weekend.

[tweet url=" https://twitter.com/NiallOfficial/status/766784085..." hide_media="0" hide_thread="1"]

So How Does McGregor Stack Up Against Others? 

Compared to other male UFC/MMA stars, McGregor wipes the floor in terms of his share of voice (% of overall mentions). He has nearly twice as many mentions as Brock Lesnar. 

1 - Conor McGregor - 44% - 6.4m mentions
2 - Brock Lesnar - 24% - 3.4m mentions
3 - Nate Diaz - 14% - 1.99m mentions
4 - Jon Jones - 9% - 1.3m mentions
5 - Jose Aldo - 5% - 0.7m mentions
6 - Michael Bisping - 4% - 0.5m mentions

In comparison, Olympic legend Usain Bolt generated 5.8m mentions compared to McGregor's 6.4m in the same time period. Bolt won three gold medals during the same time. 


Source: Colin Oliver (@Collie_Ollie). Read the full report here. 
Data generated using multiple social listening tools from the period of Aug 23rd 2015 to Aug 22nd 2016.