React: Thousands of People are Tweeting about Wimbledon Every Hour

The gates of Wimbledon 2015 have just opened.

Keen tennis fans who’ve been queuing all morning for tickets are basking in the sun, trying to figure out which court they can huddle around. Already, the first few matches are underway.

Twitter has introduced a new emoji to mark the annual tournament.

The tiny tennis racket has been attached to over 102,000 Tweets already – and we’re only halfway through day one.

We’ve combed through all of them so far to give you a taste of what’s it’s like to be courtside, and to see who social’s favorite is.

We can see you

Tournament attendees (who are expected to total well over half a million) tend leave their geo-tagged location on when Tweeting.

This means we can (roughly) see what matches people are attending.

Who’s winning in terms of social buzz?

So far, judging by almost 6,000 Tweets today alone, the social favorite for the mens’ competition is Roger Federer.

In second place is Andy Murray.

The favorite of years gone by, Rafael Nafal, is struggling to keep up with his competitors in terms of social buzz. Perhaps he’ll fare better on the court.

For the womens’ competition, it’s Maria Sharapova – just by a hair.

In second place is Serena Williams, who currently only has a few handfuls of mentions less than Sharapova.

If you want to join in the social Wimbledon chatter yourself, remember to take of Twitter’s four new emoji hashtags for a whirl.

A crash course on them can be found right on Serena Williams’ Twitter feed.

We’ll be keeping up with the event over the rest of the week.

You can keep up to date by following @BW_React, serving up hourly social data charts, facts and diagrams.