My debut post at FanGraphs took a look at Twitter engagement metrics for every major-league team’s official Twitter account during the off-season. I promised a follow-up analysis to see if anything changed, and a lot did. The Cubs moved past the Mariners as the most engaging team on Twitter, and the Pirates produced the most media tweets in May.

Full details of the analysis can be found in the original post, but to summarize, we are looking at what teams use the most media and what teams are engaging with their fanbases the most over the month of May. Numbers are no substitute for quality engagement or customer service, but these metrics do shed light on how MLB teams are using their official Twitter accounts.

Having media in a tweet is important; it can show fans a side of baseball they don’t normally get to see or more effectively communicate information like lineups or final scores than a basic, text-only tweet.

Looking at the above graph, the Pirates had the most media tweets with 681, but they are rather close to the Diamondbacks and Rockies. Most teams fall in the 300-500 media tweets range.

While pushing out images, .gifs, and videos is important, the engagement metric I use includes replies, retweets (non-verified), and favorites (non-verified). Ideally, I’d like to weight these since replying to a tweet takes more effort than favoriting one. Retweeting effectively endorses the tweet and let’s others see that, which is another construct all together. However, I haven’t had time to design a non-arbitrary weighting system.

Over the off-season, the Mariners had the highest level of engagement, but the Cubs have overtaken them by replying to almost 2,000 tweets. The Brewers still favorite the most tweets (~1,700) and the Astros retweeted the most tweets (~200) over the month of May. The Yankees are last on the list only retweeting three non-verified tweets through out May.

Note: I continued to use only the 30 official MLB team accounts, since these are verified and have many more followers than any of the smaller Twitter accounts such as the presidents for the Nationals.