Study Ranks Charlotte Bobcats 4th In NBA Social Media Equity

Before they signed Al Jefferson this summer, the Charlotte Bobcats (soon to be Hornets again) were the laughingstock of the NBA. Majority owner and Oz behind the curtain Michael Jordan fired another one-year coach Mike Dunlap this offseason and hired Steve Clifford to take over a franchise that’s been lottery-bound in every season since Larry Brown’s ouster from the bench. But a recent study out of Emory University shows that Charlotte’s basketball fans are some of most social media savvy around.

Obviously, the Lakers took the top spot in the study, but the Emory Sports Marketing Analytics department created a model that explores social media interactions on Twitter and Facebook as a percentage of a team’s overall market size and winning percentage. Basically, it eliminates market outliers that normally prevent a team like the Bobcats/Hornets from being recognized for their social media engagement because they play in a smaller market and trot out woeful personnel on the court.

The world of social media provides an opportunity to look at fan base support without worrying about capacity or pricing issues. To look at NBA teams “social media equity” we collected follows and likes from Twitter and Facebook. We then created a statistical model that predicts these measures of social media engagement as a function of market size, tweeting activity and team performance for this past season and for the season before that. We then compared each team’s actual follows and likes against the model predictions. This method attempts to control for short term fluctuations in winning percentage and market differences.

With that model in place, the Bobcats are actually pretty high. The top team is the Lakers, followed by the Heat and the Celtics. None of those teams are surprising since Boston and LA serve large markets and possess the franchise history most people associate with the top of the NBA’s pyramid; the Heat have won the last two championships. But the Bobcats finshed fourth in the study, and it’s a surprising revelation for a franchise many consider near the top of the list for league contraction; especially if you consider the fan support and the big bucks backing the Chris Hansen-led group trying to bring a team to Seattle.

Here’s what the study says about the next three teams on the list: Charlotte, Golden State (5th) and New Orleans (6th):

It is the next three teams that are surprising as Golden State ranks 5th, New Orleans ranks 6th, and Charlotte ranks 4th. The case of Charlotte illustrates the value of our model based approach. In absolute terms, Charlotte performs relatively poorly in terms of social media metrics. However, when we adjust for team performance and market size, the team does fairly well. This indicates that the Charlotte market has fairly resilient fans, and likely speaks to the potential of the market if a consistent winning team is developed.

This is big news if you’re a Bobcats executive worried about Nascar and other distractions that can rob revenue from your team in Charlotte. Basically, the Bobcats/Hornets possess some of the most engaged fans in basketball, now all they need to do is put a winning team on the court. Easier said than done, but if you’re looking for diamonds in the rough, you can’t do much better than this. Social media engagement will go a long way towards explaining future fan support, and Charlotte’s doing pretty good so far with very little talent enticing fans to tweet or share things on Facebook.

Keep reading to find out which big market ranks near the bottom in social media equity.

Another interesting result is how low on the list the New York Knicks fan base ranks for social media equity (27th). In another study by the Emory Marketing Analytics group, the Knicks were found to have the best economic support among their fans. Anybody that’s ever ignored the astronomical cost of an Old Fashioned in the city, knows why.

Despite New York’s predominance from an economic standpoint, they rank near the bottom in fan interaction — at least in terms of social media.

What these two results imply is that the Knicks’ fan base is economically valuable but not engaged (at least in terms of social media). The Knicks play in the largest market but have only about 20% of the social media activity of the Lakers.

The Knicks might have some of the smartest fans in the league (I’m biased since I live here), but they are less likely to tweet or post to Facebook about their team. This stands in contrast to the blossoming tech sector in the city (it’s like Palo Alto East at this point), and while Knicks fans might find a way to gripe about Amar’e Stoudemire‘s interior defense IRL, they aren’t extolling the virtues of their team nearly as much on Facebook and Twitter.

People should remember the study is evaluating results on Twitter and Facebook as the primary measuring tools for online engagement. Because New York is one of the leaders in tech start-ups (though still behind Northern California), Knicks fans may be interacting on platforms that aren’t being measured. But that’s not enough to excuse the findings since the overwhelming majority of fans in New York and elsewhere still use Facebook and Twitter to celebrate their team’s success or grumble about various team moves.

Conversely, while the Bobcats face even more losing during the 2013-14 season, team executives should note how engaged their fans are on social media. The NBA has led the other major professional sports in online engagement, and it’s got to be a relief for a team like Charlotte, which ranks near the bottom in most other polls of this nature, that they’ve finally got something to cheer about — though not yet on the court.

Now if they can find a way to teach Bismack Biyombo a jump hook and some basic ball skills, they might have something.

[h/t Inside the Lakers]

What do you think?

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