In the month of February 2018 alone, MLB social video accounts pulled in 44.3 million total views across all their content. Instagram Is Key for the MLB In general, official MLB accounts have the most views across all the main social video platforms, as opposed to any particular team’s account. Plus, in all 12 months of 2017, the MLB earned roughly 600 million total views on its Instagram videos, the most views generated by any of the League’s official social video accounts. Why, then, does the MLB get the majority of its views from its third-largest social audience? While clips of a similar nature or topic are uploaded to MLB’s official Facebook account (which saw 142 million fewer views in 2017 at a total of 458 million views), it’s obvious baseball fans head to Instagram first to get their daily fill of the bat-and-ball sport. That being said, out of the MLB’s top ten most-watched videos from 2017, all but one of them came from Facebook. However, some teams do maintain their own social video accounts, so let’s take a look at the top five best-performing MLB teams in terms of video views from the month of February 2018: Overall, the New York Yankees was the clear team leader with a total of 7.1 million total views in the month of February. The majority of these views (5.8 million) hailed from Facebook, while the remaining 1.3 million came from the Yankees Instagram account. The only other team to adopt a multi-platform social video strategy like this was the Red Sox, whose 4.8 million views were spread across Facebook (4.6 million views), Instagram (137K views), and YouTube (19.6K views). So, if the western division teams are following their data closely and know their fans want to see more video content, there’s a perfect opportunity to take advantage of that desire right now by uploading clips to their individual team accounts or improving on their current strategies for their strongest-performing platforms.
The 2018 Major League Baseball season is now officially in full swing (yes, pun intended). For several weeks previous to the season’s start, my home in Phoenix was inundated with visitors from around the United States, since we’re the spring training hub for 15 teams appropriately known as the Cactus League. So being both in close proximity to these pre-season games and working in the video industry naturally had me curious: how is Major League Baseball (MLB) doing in terms of video marketing?
With origins in a children’s game called “rounders” and the very British sport of cricket, baseball has moved from a beloved American pastime to one of the most-attended professional sports leagues in the nation. The MLB has plenty to boast about with its digital “attendance,” too: the League’s official YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts collectively boast 20 million subscribers, with roughly 69% of them hailing from the U.S. In the month of February 2018 alone, MLB social video accounts pulled in 44.3 million total views across all their content. The League also recently landed YouTube TV as the top sponsor of its 2018 and 2019 World Series games. Clearly, the MLB is doing something right with its social video efforts.
Let’s dig a little further to see how the MLB performs on different platforms, as well as which individual teams are pulling in the most views and engagement!
Instagram Is Key for the MLB
In general, official MLB accounts have the most views across all the main social video platforms, as opposed to any particular team’s account. But baseball fans definitely have a preference for where they want to watch content from the League. Since January 1, 2018, for example, the League has generated 86.1 million views via Instagram, 22.2 million more than on Facebook. Plus, in all 12 months of 2017, the MLB earned roughly 600 million total views on its Instagram videos, the most views generated by any of the League’s official social video accounts.
I found this fact particularly fascinating, especially since the MLB’s 4.1 million followers on Instagram are not where the majority of the organization’s fans hang out online. More followers on one platform, of course, doesn’t guarantee the most views from that platform, but it seems like it should. The League doesn’t follow this assumption; the organization has the most followers on Twitter at 8.2 million followers, and then on Facebook at 6.9…
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