If you haven't guessed it yet, I am kind of a stats geek. I am also a die-hard sports fan. Many a night I have spent writing post for this site in front of some sort of game on TV.
In thinking about how the "By the Numbers" series could branch out further from social media user stats, it seemed only natural that I work in a sports list or two.
This list looks at all current teams across the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA and compares their Facebook fan base.
I found this comparison interesting on three different levels. I wanted to see:
- How do the sports match up against each other?
- How do the individual teams within each sport compare?
- How do the various market sizes compare?
The results were interesting. Here are a few observations:
- The top 10 most liked pages include 5 basketball teams, 2 baseball and 3 football. One would think that the NFL would top the list, given their popularity and ratings, but the NBA does very well with a younger demographic, who are prime targets for a Facebook page like.
- You won’t find a NHL team until #32 (Boston Bruins). A bit lower than I expected, but not shocking, the NHL does well in my neck of the woods (Boston), but there are large sections of the United States that aren’t very interested in hockey. It also doesn’t help that Facebook has a penetration problem in one of the top three largest countries to embrace hockey (Russia).
- The top 10 most talked about (page engagement metric) pages include: 5 football teams, 4 baseball and 1 basketball. This makes sense since football preseason has just kicked off and baseball is right in the middle of their season.
- It is the off-season for the Lakers, so their presence at #10 most talked about is a testament to the continuing interest in the team.
- Big market teams clearly have an advantage. The Pittsburgh Pirates are in the middle of a season in which they are one of the best teams in baseball and they are only the 30th most talked about team. The Pirates are #83 on the most liked list. Even worse, the Astros, with the fewest wins in all of MLB, have 40,000 more likes and rank 4 spots ahead of the first place Pirates.
- The Miami Marlins are ahead of 16 NHL teams on the most liked list….and if only some of those likers would go to their games…
As with all of my stats posts, I will be updating and adding to this post periodically. It will be interesting to see how it changes throughout the year.
Without further ado, here is the entire list ranked from most to least page likes:
Image Credit: Thomas Angermann via flickr
(add in chart)