By Simon Ogus – Email | Twitter | Articles
Last week, we explored how actively Major League Baseball teams use Twitter. With the NHL playoff s starting up this week, its a great ime to see how the two sports compare.
The findings are a bit surprising, to say the least, considering how much more media attention is given to the MLB compared to the NHL. While there is no current NHL team with as many Twitter followers as the Phillies or Yankees, overall the league does a much better job promoting their Twitter accounts than MLB.
The NHL had eleven teams with over 100k followers, while MLB had only nine. The most striking difference between the two leagues is the number of teams who paid little attention to their Twitter account. While MLB had twelve teams with fewer than 50k followers, the NHL only had four such teams. Even the Winnipeg Jets, who are in their first season of re-existence, have more followers than 19 MLB teams.
The Montreal Canadiens had a miserable 2011-12 season on the ice, but became the Eastern Conference kings of social media with over 267k Twitter followers. Meanwhile, the Vancouver Canucks blew away the competition in the Western Conference having over 249k followers, with the 2nd closest conference competitor being the Chicago Blackhawks at 161k followers. The Pittsburgh Penguins took 2nd place in the Eastern Conference both on and off the ice this season with just over 202k followers.
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Conversely, the Phoenix Coyotes had the least amount of followers with just over 37k. The NY Islanders, despite being the most active team in the NHL on Twitter with over 24k posts, still are shy of the 40k follower mark. The least active team was the St. Louis Blues with just 3,320 posts but that hasn’t hurt their Twitter success with over 70k followers.
By far the most quirky find in our research was the Toronto Maple Leafs following over 25k Twitter users. They must have a large social media staff to read all those Tweets!
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Interested in how your favorite team fared? Check out the playoff bracket below and send us your comments.
(Team logos credit: http://www.wikipedia.org/)