Which NBA teams follow and favorite the most? Who sends the most multimedia tweets?

On Sunday, I wrote an introduction to some NBA team account data that I compiled over the weekend. In that post, I looked at tweets per day, link usage and hashtag usage. Today, I’ll circle back to some more higher-level Twitter stats.

Million followers club: @NBA with 12.9 million, @Lakers with 4.2 million, @MiamiHEAT with 2.9 million, @ChicagoBulls with 2.0 million, @Celtics with 1.6 million, @OrlandoMagic with 1.2 million and @NYKnicks with 1.1 million.

The Magic are the most surprising entrant there. @OKCThunder have 986,076 and the @Spurs have 896,535, but there’s a large gap after those two teams. Sure, Orlando was really good during the Dwight Howard era. But he’s been gone for three years now. Anyone have theories as to why the Magic are up here with the NBA’s biggest brands? That’s just one stat that threw me completely for a loop.

Fewest followers: @Bucks at 300,365, @SacramentoKings at 302,104, @ATLHawks at 306,090, @PelicansNBA at 308,830, @MNTimberwolves at 314,438 and @UtahJazz at 322,932.

As you can tell already, NBA team Twitter accounts are skewed heavily to the right. The average number of followers is 819,000 but the median is 525,000. This large chunk of mid-market teams all is in the low 300K range. None of these accounts are too surprising and we’ll continue to mention the Hawks a lot. Just behind these teams is the @NBADLeague account at 237,487.

Following the most: @MiamiHEAT following 159,000.

Different brands in different industries take different approaches to the number of accounts they follow back. Do you want your brand to be directly associated with fans, reporters and all of your other constituents? The Miami Heat take it to the extreme with their (relatively) massive following count. No other team is above 18,000. The average of the other 29 teams is only 4,000.

Following the fewest: @Lakers following 65, @PelicansNBA following 118, @Celtics following 146 and @LAClippers following 204.

At the far other extreme are these four teams. The Lakers and Clippers are co-inhabitants of the Staples Center, so perhaps there’s a general conservative approach for those two franchises. The Celtics, as I mentioned yesterday, are the least active team on Twitter already. So that shouldn’t be too surprising.

Most favorites: @DenverNuggets at 6,759.

Similarly to following counts, favorites are another stat that might or might not matter at all. The Nuggets are the favorite champion, perhaps making up for their weak Twitter performance in sending out links. If they’re engaging fans and exciting them with favorites, does that promote as much brand affinity as the possible revenue generation from website traffic? Likely not. But it’s something, at least.

Fewest favorites: @NYKnicks with 12, @MiamiHEAT with 13, @WashWizards with 17.

These are the opposite ends of the Nuggets. Again, the conservative approach is to not be formally affiliated with these tweets since all fans can look at your favorites.

Highest Photo/Video Ratio: @DallasMavs with 24.9%.

Here was a neat stat I thought about to measure different kinds of tweets: Look at the total number of photos/videos sent by the account and divide by the total tweets. The Mavericks are the champions of sending out the most photos/videos historically, at one-fourth of all tweets.

Lowest Photo/Video Ratio: @ChicagoBulls at 5.9%, @MiamiHeat at 6.2% and @Celtics at 6.3%.

The Bulls are one of the biggest brands in basketball and have one of the largest following bases. But they don’t send out the notorious high-engagement types of tweets like photos and videos. Again, here’s a mention of the Heat and the Celtics. I’m not sure why these teams are so low. I’ll hope that it’s skewed by past data and that they’ve all been much higher of late.

Which NBA teams tweet the most? Who loves to use #hashtags?

A look at the most-used @Raptors hashtags

Remember BballTwitterlytics? Well, we’re back with a new project that I wanted to get to months ago. The data is now more meaningful since we’re midway through the season. So let’s just go with the idea that we purposefully waited two months to update the blog and not that we forgot about it or anything. That totally didn’t happen.

As Zachary Bennett mentioned in his intro to this site, we’ll be relying upon Twitonomy.com often as a great public data source. Most social media analytics websites only give you data for your individual account. So to be able to blog effectively about BballTwitterlytics, we need more data on our hands. I shared a list of a few other social media resources in this site’s second blog post.

On late Saturday night, I went around to the Twitonomy pages of every NBA team, the @NBA official account and the @NBADLeague account. The goal was to look at trends, establish baseline averages and make whatever other kinds of random conclusions we can from teams’ most recent 3,000-ish tweets. Here are a few initial observations for today. We’ll have a few more posts on this data throughout the week.

The biggest volume tweeter: @Bucks. 61.5 tweets per day.

Kudos to the folks over in Milwaukee for being active and trying new things. Over 60 tweets per day is a pretty significant amount, putting them among the rankings of the most active NBA bloggers. But the real champion here? @NBA. The league’s official account sends out a staggering 106.7 tweets per day. Twitonomy says 57% are retweets, but that’s still a ton.

The most infrequent tweeter: @Celtics. 8.4 tweets per day.

There will be more mentions of the Celtics later on as well. Perhaps it just doesn't fit with their brand identity to be too active on Twitter? They have over 1.6 million followers. The next lowest on the volume tweeting pole is @OKCThunder at 9.2 tweets per day. They nearly have a million followers themselves. With audiences that large, it seems odd to not deliver a bit more content.

Most links: @ATLHawks. 0.50 links per tweet.

The Twitonomy formula likely combines photo/video “links” in here too. But it’s a strong performance by the Hawks, a Twitter account that will be mentioned frequently in subsequent posts. Next up: @Cavs at 0.47 and @DallasMavs at 0.45.

Fewest links: @DenverNuggets. 0.08 links per tweet.

Not very many photos from the Nuggets social media team. A potential reason for the diluted number of links? Lots and lots of in-game replies. Denver leads NBA teams with 56% of tweets counted as replies in the Twitonomy system. But the Hawks are actually second in that stat at 43%. So perhaps ignore that. Seems like a missed opportunity here from the Nuggets.

Most frequent hashtagger: @WashWizards. 1.46 hashtags per tweet.

They go with the #wizards hashtag quite a lot, but the impressive part here is the diversity. It appears the Washington social media team goes with the template of #wiz[opposing team nickname] for every game. And that adds up the tweets in bunches in a non-traditional way.

Second-most frequent hashtagger: @Raptors. 1.40 hashtags per tweet.

To a certain extent, the Wizards are boring. Let’s talk more about Toronto. Their most common hashtags in the data set: #rtz in 50% of tweets, #wethenorth in 35% of tweets and #raptors in 28% of tweets. No wonder they were so successful with the Kyle Lowry All-Star campaign. They already had plenty of experience as the brand-centric hashtag champs.

Least frequent hashtagger: @Celtics. 0.12 hashtags per tweet.

Honorable mention goes out to @Sixers who were just behind them at 0.13 hashtags per tweet. And yes, the Raptors have three hashtags used more frequently per tweet than all hashtags used by Boston and Philadelphia combined. I’m not really certain what that means, but it sounds staggering.