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.