Welcome to my second posting. Now I’ll explain what makes the NBAs social media great compared to NFL and MLB.
I will start with an article written by Seerat Sohi (https://www.sbnation.com/2018/10/10/17950062/nba-tv-ratings-twitter-social-media-rise). This article explains beautifully how social media has turned the TV ratings of NBA upwards.
In the article, Sohi writes that the NFL banned its teams from using videos and GIFs on social media in 2016, while the NBA embraced the use of social media. Players in the NBA regularly engage with fans on social media. For example, superstar Kevin Durant responds to fans on Twitter on a regular basis (https://fadeawayworld.net/2018/07/26/kevin-durant-caught-arguing-with-fan-on-twitter-deletes-tweets-afterwards/). This engages the fans to talk more about the NBA (maybe in hopes of an answer by their favourite player) on social media, which in turn increases the exposure of NBA. This smart (and free!) makes sure that the NBA will be discussed no matter what, which in turn will make people more interested in the sport.
NBA is also known for its “twitter drama”. Everything that happens around the league is heavily discussed on Twitter, therefore creating even more interest around the sport. It’s not unusual that the players themselves participate in the discussions. For example, when Mario Hezonja from the New York Knicks blocked Lebron James’s last second shot, Enes Kanter (player for Portland Trail Blazers) mocked Lebron with Lebron’s own signature hashtag.
#StriveForGreatness 😂🗽— Enes Kanter (@Enes_Kanter) 17 March 2019
Another example on players using social media is Joel Embiid “trolling” his opponent, Andre Drummond:
I own a lot of real estate in @andredrummondd head and I’m on my way to build more 🏘🏘🏘 #Bum #TheProcess pic.twitter.com/Mrf2NcNL4r— Joel Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) 3 November 2018
With the use of social media, the NBA and the players have created a new kind of stimuli to raise awareness and attention to its product, especially for generation Y. However, the drama and player engagement isn’t the only thing that has made NBAs use of social media so great. More on this topic next week. See you!
Jere’s digital marketing journey 
This is really interesting! I’ve noticed that NBA fans seem to be a lot more involved and personal (at least on the facebook page) than other sports and even know someone who has NBA news alerts set on their phone. Pretty clever marketing!
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Yeah, the league and the players have managed to get people excited for events and news outside the ball court, which definitely is an advantage.
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Nice post! Looking over the social media accounts of all the big sports leagues, NBA definitely do the best job encouraging and creating the most fan engagement.
Do you think that their social media dominance, however, can be fully attributed to their superior digital marketing presence? Or is it possible that basketball as a sport is more popular worldwide, which has lead to the biggest basketball league in the world gaining so many more followers than other American sports leagues?
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That’s an excellent point. I don’t have any statistical evidence (might be a good topic for a future posting to run a regression to see how much different factors affect the number of followers), but I definitely feel that popularity is one of the biggest reasons for the discrepancy between the number of followers, amongst factors like entertainment and pace of the game. However, I think that without exciting content, the number of followers would be much smaller.
I also think, that the international popularity of the league is also one reason for NBAs heavy use of social media. Because many fans live in different time zones, they don’t have the same access to watch the games. Thus, it’s important that NBA posts highlights and that the players create off court drama to keep the fans involved in the product. In that way, fans outside North America can consume the product through social media.
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