MLB Twitter Account Power Rankings

Rebuilding

30. Chicago White Sox (@whitesox)

Followers: 418,639

Best recent tweet:

After setting the baseball world on fire and overtaking the Kansas City Royals atop the American League Central, the White Sox have come plummeting back down to Earth with a 3-7 record in their last 10 games.  Coincidentally, their recent play has mirrored their Twitter feed.

Despite having stars like Chris Sale, Jose Abreu and Todd Frazier in town, the White Sox consistently fail to deliver quality content before, during and after games.  Instead of sharing gifs, vines or even videos during games, they choose to share images of their players along with stat lines throughout the game.

Here’s an example during Jose Quintana’s last start.

Okay, not bad.

Good to know he has legs.

Oh, a new angle.  Cool.

If Quintana was truly that dominant, why not share some videos of his performance?  The one thing the White Sox have that isn’t that bad is their pre and post-game graphics.

The slant doesn’t make much sense, but the font and image are solid.  Chicago has a lot of work to do on Twitter if they hope to escape the shadow of the Cubs.

29. Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers)

Followers: 349,502

Best recent tweet:

With a dearth of talent on the major league roster, the Milwaukee Brewers continually need to come up with creative ways to increase excitement through their social media.  But unfortunately, they haven’t been able to this season.

When a franchise is based around beer, though, there shouldn’t be any shortage of interesting content to post.  Plus, they could always revert to the beer emoji, which is a winner among group chats around the world.

Instead, the Brew Crew share a lot of images of their mascots, boring stat updates and retweet things happening in the community.  But typically, none of that content is attention grabbing.

When they do use visual content, it’s with Twitter video instead of Vine.  The following video is about 10 seconds too long, and would work much better as a loopable vine.

Every so often, they throw in a joke or emoji, and that’s just enough to keep the Brewers out of last place.

28. San Diego Padres (@Padres)

Stuck in the basement of the National League West, the Padres are forced to live in the shadows of the Dodgers and Giants on the field.  On Twitter, it’s more of the same. Without much star power on the roster aside from the declining Matt Kemp, the Padres are forced to stick to the basics of MLB Twitter.

With Wil Myers and Drew Pomeranz emerging as legitimate stars, the Padres should make more use of them on Twitter.

Instead, they’ll occasionally post videos like this.

A video of Melvin Upton Jr. playing catch isn’t the most stimulating content on Twitter, though.  Maybe a gif of an Upton home run would work, or a quick interview with him before the game.

Even when something exciting happens, the Padres manage to make it boring.

Not many people care about seeing stadium graphics outside of the actual ballpark.

At least they manage to match the color scheme throughout their Twitter graphics.

27. Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers)

Followers: 973,283

Best recent tweet:

With one of the larger followings in MLB, the Dodgers have a real chance to capture the attention of fans in the larger world of sports Twitter.  Unfortunately, they haven’t strayed too far from the typical game updates with occasional video that plagues so many teams toward the bottom of these rankings.

When you have a player like Clayton Kershaw, there’s no excuse to not have viral gifs and vines.  To their credit, the Dodgers do have over 38 million loops on Vine, but they haven’t posted one since April 28.

Since then, most of their in-game images have been shots of the field from the press box (this is at Wrigley Field).

They’ve also experimented with some unique ways to present their lineup, but not all have panned out.

The players swinging their bats is a great concept, but for a non-fan, at least share the names in the bottom of each square.

The Dodgers have the pieces in place to be among the best on Twitter, but they’re just not there yet.

26. Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles)

Followers: 462,729

Best recent tweet:

As the Orioles look to stay near the top of the AL East, their Twitter account is trying its hardest to get the team’s stars to the All-Star game.  Much of the Orioles recent content has focused on their #VoteOrange campaign, promoting players like Mark Trumbo and Manny Machado.

Other than that, the Orioles don’t do much in the way of visual content.  Their lineup cards are among the best in the league when they use a graphic with the cartoon Oriole, but they lack in creativity when it’s simply a picture of the printed lineup card.

When they do have visual content, it’s typically a link to an MLB.com video or article – and on Twitter, that’s unacceptable.  The Orioles don’t do one thing particularly well on Twitter, but none of their content is bad, which leaves them just outside the top 25.

Next: 25-21: Eh