Conor McGregor beats Floyd Mayweather on Twitter
Today, the 26th of August 2017, Conor McGregor will make his professional boxing debut in a match against Floyd Mayweather in Las Vegas. Conor McGregor is an MMA world champion, while Floyd Mayweather is a former boxing world champion with a an impressive 49–0 record. According to bookmakers the odds are clearly in favor of Floyd Mayweather. Both fighters are active on Twitter, where Floyd Mayweather uses Twitter handle @FloydMayweather and Conor McGregor uses Twitter handle @TheNotoriousMMA. If we look at some Twitter statistics we can determine who is having a bigger impact on Twitter.
- Monthly followers
Floyd Mayweather started using Twitter in May 2009 and has 7.4 million followers currently. Conor McGregor started Twitter more than 2 year later in September 2011 and currently 5.7 million followers. A look at monthly statistical data shows that Conor McGregor is rapidly catching up, and will most likely catch up with Floyd Mayweather soon.

Available data show that Floyd Mayweather had 1.2 million followers at the end of May 2011, which is the first month for which we had data. The first data we have for Conor McGregor is from April 2013 when he had just 25,607 followers at the end of the month. It is clear to see that the growth curve for Conor McGregor really started to become a lot steeper from November 2015 onward, when he was about to fight Jose Aldo for the UFC world featherweight championship.

A chart since January 2015 clearly shows how the growth of new followers has developed for both fighters:

The chart shows that new followers for Floyd Mayweather grew fast in the run up to his fight against Manny Pacquiao on May 2nd 2015.

After this fight, growth of new followers started to slow down for Floyd Mayweather to much lower levels of around 30–50 thousand each month. Growth of followers for Conor McGregor accelerated in November 2015 and has remained high with well over 100 thousand new followers each month.
2. Daily followers
For daily followers we looked at data since June 14th when the fight was announced:

It is very obvious that on ever single day from June 14th to August 25th Conor McGregor gained much more followers on Twitter than Floyd Mayweather. On average new followers per day for this period was 17.5 thousand for Conor McGregor and 2.3 thousand for Floyd Mayweather.
3. Tweet engagement
For tweet engagement Conor McGregor is also the clear winner. If we just look at the tweet from each fighter that announced the fight the difference is clear.
Conor McGregor has 2.5 times more retweets and 4 times more likes for his announcement tweet than Floyd Mayweather. For both fighters this was their most popular tweet in recent months.
Conclusion
The numbers on Twitter don’t lie. The only metric that is in favor of Floyd Mayweather is the number of followers. He still has 1.7 million followers more than Conor McGregor. However Conor McGregor is catching up fast, and could easily surpass Floyd Mayweather before the end of the year, if the trends for both fighters continue. With respect to tweets is Conor McGregor not just more active, with more tweets per month, but he also has much more engagement with his tweets than Floyd Mayweather. Clearly, irrespective of the outcome of the fight this evening in Las Vegas, Conor McGregor is already a winner on Twitter.
Hashtags for the evening are #MayweatherMcGregor, #Mcgregor and #Mayweather.
