MLB Postseason Teams Earned 281.4M Engagements During 2022 Regular Season
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The Major League Baseball postseason party has expanded in 2022, as three wild card clubs from each league will join the division winners for a month-long playoff pursuit of the Commissioner’s Trophy, which will be awarded to baseball’s top team in less than a month. The field comprises recent champions including the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers, traditional powers such as the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals, and even teams breaking playoff droughts of more than a decade in the Philadelphia Phillies and Seattle Mariners. But while each club charted a different path to this stage, they share the same goal – winning a World Series. That objective has been top of mind for all 12 participants since they arrived at the ballpark on Opening Day, and they have each been chronicling journeys they hope will end in triumph on social media along the way. We used MVP’s omnichannel platform to compare the playoff teams’ social prowess and presences since April 7, examining metrics including engagements, impressions, and post value while also exploring platform breakdowns. Collectively, the clubs earned 281.4 million engagements, with a pair of baseball bluebloods accounting for 34.4% of that total.
Throughout the regular season, there was seldom a doubt about who would emerge victorious in the American League East and National League West. The New York Yankees raced to a commanding lead in the standings during the season’s first half and did enough to maintain their gap through the dog days of summer. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Dodgers got hot early and never slowed down, finishing with a league-best and franchise-record 111 wins. The teams’ success combined with their immense national fan bases helped the Boys in Blue and Bronx Bombers sweep the top two places of each social metric we examined during the regular season. The pair combined for 48 of the top 50 most engaging posts shared by 2022 playoff teams this season, with the Dodgers’ crossover post featuring Raheem Sterling of Premier League club Chelsea FC leading the way and Yankees content showcasing Aaron Judge after hitting his 61st home run of the year finishing third overall. Notably, four of the top 10 most engaging posts during the season were part of the Yankees’ campaign to raise gun violence awareness in May. Consistently high-performing posts helped the Dodgers amass 55.1 million total engagements during the regular season while the Yankees accumulated 41.7 million. Defending World Series champion Atlanta earned third place in the category with 30.5 million.
The top three places in our impressions and post value rankings featured the same trio of teams, although the Yankees usurped the Dodgers for first place in each of these categories. Over the course of the season, the Yankees created 2.13 billion total social impressions, followed by the Dodgers’ 1.48 billion and the Braves’ 999.6 million. The Houston Astros and the Cardinals, with 924.9 million and 916.5 million, respectively, completed a top five consisting of only division winners. However, the sixth division winner, the Cleveland Guardians, finished 11th overall with a mere 325.4 million impressions. It was a consistent ranking for Cleveland, who eclipsed only the Tampa Bay Rays in each metric we analyzed.
The playoff teams’ combined 10.3 billion impressions helped generate $205.4M in post value, with the Yankees’ $44.9M representing the largest share. New York’s total surpassed LA’s $30.9M by 1.53x and more than doubled every other team’s aggregate. The top five in terms of post value were identical to our impression rankings, as Atlanta generated $20.2M in post value and the Astros edged St. Louis by an $18.3M to $18.1M margin. The Toronto Blue Jays, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, and San Diego Padres also all exceeded $10M in total post value during the season.
Baseball clubs tend to follow a similar blueprint for their approach to social media, causing comparable results by platform. Each of the 12 postseason teams was most active on Twitter during the regular season, with a combined 25,141 posts on the app resulting in $115.7M in collective post value – 56.3% of the all-platform total. Furthermore, Twitter was the leading value generator for each club, with only the Dodgers and Astros receiving less than half of their overall total from the platform. Twitter was also responsible for the most impressions, creating 5.82 million compared to Facebook’s 3.06 million and Instagram’s 1.39 million. However, despite ranking third in both post value and impressions, Instagram was the runaway leader in engagements earned, as the 12 playoff teams received 156.5 million engagements on the image-sharing app – 2.48x more than Facebook elicited and 2.56x more than Twitter totaled. With the exception of the Yankees and Cardinals, each team received more than 50% of its total engagements on Instagram.
Four teams enter the 2022 MLB playoffs having won more than 100 games this year, but as soon as the first pitch of the postseason is thrown in Cleveland this afternoon, those records will be wiped clean. Eight teams will compete in the first Wild Card round of its kind over the next three days in hopes of advancing to next week’s League Division Series, and at this point of the year, continuing to win games and advance is critical to achieving lifelong dreams. The club that executes on the mound and in the batter’s box most consistently and timely throughout October will stamp its place in baseball history and celebrate at the season’s end. MVP will continue to monitor the teams’ chronicles on social media, so stay connected for regular updates as the postseason progresses.
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