MLB and their Social Video Strategy

The key to success in Marketing comes with analysing the number produced by the strategy, so let’s take a look at it.

The season has started and MLB is in full swing adopting their social video strategy to reach most of the American crowd through social media. For several weeks previous to the season’s start, Phoenix was inundated with visitors from around the United States, since was the spring training hub for 15 teams appropriately known as the Cactus League. So being both near these pre-season games and working in the video industry naturally had me curious: how is Major League Baseball (MLB) doing regarding video marketing?

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.

As you can see from the video above their Digital Marketing is boasting a total of 100K views in just 5 hours (at the time of the post). This is definitely an index of success when we talk about Digital Marketing, not many brands can make this kind of number in just 5 hours.

With roughly 70% of them hailing from the U.S. In 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 it’s 2018 and 2019 World Series games. The MLB is doing something right with its social video efforts.

In general, official MLB accounts have the most views across all the leading social video platforms, as opposed to any particular team’s account.

With Instagram the key leader of the Social Strategy. The same video that I posted above has 263k views and almost a thousand comments.

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. These are astonishing numbers, more the half a billion views in only 3 months and all of this in Pre Season.

These data show clearly the success of multi-platform distribution (something that I mentioned in a recent blog post). It’s interesting to see that they get the most view from the third largest social audience, Why, then, does the MLB get the majority of its views from its third-largest social audience?

The answer seems to lie in the type of content uploaded to MLB’s Instagram. Clips, highlights, and promos dominate the organisation’s videos on that platform, the majority of which are short and easy to digest, the perfect format for Instagram. 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.

Top Teams Prefer Facebook

Even if the MLB social media get’s the most of the views on Instagram the team prefer Facebook has their social media.

Individual League teams seem less inclined to create individual video strategies, and instead, choose to ride the wave that is their parent organisation’s video marketing goals. However, some teams do maintain their social video accounts, so let’s take a look at the top five best-performing MLB teams regarding video views from February 2018:

New York Yankees (7.1 million views)
Chicago Cubs (6.9 million views)
Boston Red Sox (4.8 million views)
St. Louis Cardinals (3.5 million views)
Philadelphia Phillies (3.2 million views)
Overall, the New York Yankees was the clear team leader with a total of 7.1 million total views in the month of February alone.

Does this mean Facebook is the only place other MLB teams should consider distributing videos?

I Think the power of the multi-platform distribution should be considered by the team, why use only one Social Media when you have the top 3 giant generating you half a billion views?

Let’s see what the season brings in, if the preseason started with 600 million views in just 3 months, let’s see the remaining 7 months what bring to the table.