Tennis’ bad boy Bernard Tomic was the most popular Aussie player in the 2013 Australian Open on social media, a report has found.

Tomic has made headlines this week for losing his licence after being caught speeding again in his Ferrari on the Gold Coast.

But the controversy-courting player proved a hit on social networks, according to IBM’s Social Sentiment Index.

Tomic was the eighth most popular player overall, according to an analysis of positive sentiments, and was the fourth most liked mens player behind Roger Federer in third.

However, it was the Australian Open champions Novak Djokovic and Victoria Azarenka who really won tennis fans over.

The pair were the most positively mentioned players of the tournament, claiming 97% positive sentiment across Twitter, Facebook, forums, news sites, blogs and videos.

The tournament’s most tweeted about contestant was Serena Williams, followed by Djokovic and then sister Venus Williams in third. Federrer was the ninth most tweeted about player.

Following Sloane Stevens’ unexpected win over Serena Williams her Twitter fan base more than tripled.

The final day of the Open generated more than 1.02 million tweets.

Graham Kittle, business analytics and optimization of IBM Global Business Services for Australia and New Zealand, said: “Through our partnership with Tennis Australia, IBM is able to demonstrate the value of business analytics technology through its application at a major sporting event – a living lab environment.”

“ The explosion of social media means marketers have unprecedented access to unstructured data about their brands. Using analytics tools, they can analysis in real-time public commentary from blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to spot patterns that help them understand how people feel about their brands and to quickly identify shifts in attitudes.

“They can use these insights to do everything from improving product development to fine-tuning advertising messages.”