How tweet it is for social-media savvy Blue Jays
TORONTO MLB FRANCHISE A BIG DRAW ON TWITTER
The Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs have two of the three strongest heritage brands in baseball, behind only the New York Yankees. Yet going into this first week of the new Major League Baseball season, they don’t have the following on Twitter of the Toronto Blue Jays. Only the Yankees ( 2.16 million) have more Twitter followers than the Blue Jays ( 1.9 million) and no franchise in North American professional sport is growing at a faster clip on social media than Canada’s MLB team.
Since f ormer general manager Alex Anthopoulos pulled the trigger on a flurry of deadline deals in July 2015 and the Blue Jays began a run of back- to- back appearances in the American League Championship Series, they’ve more than tripled their Twitter f an base. Using their MLB monopoly in Canada, the Jays are the most- followed Canadian sport franchise, setting the pace for the Toronto Maple Leafs ( 1.5 million), Toronto Raptors ( 1.37 million), Montreal Canadiens ( 1.36 million) and Vancouver Canucks (918,000).
It’s also been a bullish week for the Washington Capitals, who’ll go into the Stanley Cup tournament next week with their second consecutive Presidents’ Trophy and top seeding in the NHL playoffs. Meanwhile, the Golden State Warriors clinched the top seed in the NBA’s Western Conference as they won their 204 th game in the past three seasons, eclipsing a record set by the 1995- 1998 Chicago Bulls (203).
It was another big week in women’s sport and NCAA March Madness closed out up 21 per cent in TV ratings and almost 30 per cent in video streaming.
Yet the biggest winner in the business of sport this week was Amazon, now holders of video- streaming rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package.
The US$ 50 million it cost Amazon to pull the rights from Twitter will be a small price to pay for it to drive even more traffic through its richly diversified Internet platform. The Amazon deal is yet another move away from the convention of network television and a glimpse of the very different world that it and other digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Netflix are creating for sport fans of all ages, especially the next generation of consumers rising as 18- 34 millennials and Generation Z teenagers.
BEARS- OF- THE- WEEK
No matter how bad the profession of officiating looked Monday night in the NCAA college basketball championship final on CBS, TNT and TSN, no sport business file had a worse week than Olympic men’s hockey.
If the NHL’s decision this week to forego a three- week break in its 2017-18 schedule holds, everyone loses and nobody wins.
The NHL loses its biggest global marketing opportunity and a chance to set up real stakes in the Asian market at PyeongChang 2018 and Beijing 2022.
The IIHF loses its prestige as custodians of what has become—on the strength of NHL players — the highest- profile event at the Winter Olympics. The IOC loses its single- biggest television magnet at the Winter Games.
Yet the real losers will be hockey fans who have turned on to the Olympics in droves since Nagano 1998 and those top players who genuinely see the Olympics as their chance to play for the love of the game and the love of country.