When NBA teams first started creating Twitter accounts in late 2008 and early 2009, they primarily used the platform to provide injury updates, blast out ticket promotions, and make meta posts about Twitter itself. In the beginning, the tweets were usually sent by members of the teams’ public relations or traditional marketing staffs, with mixed results. Some teams mistook Twitter for Facebook, and others clearly didn’t understand the vocabulary of the platform. Nearly a decade later, teams do understand the awesome power of Twitter and have hired employees dedicated exclusively to producing social media and digital content; one of the authors of this piece, Max Rappaport, was among them, working for the Philadelphia 76ers from 2012-15.
Last year, we ranked each of the league’s 30 team Twitter accounts, with the Trailblazers, Hawks, and Sixers all earning a podium spot. Since then, a good number of teams throughout the league have moved toward the more conversational and humorous style utilized by those three teams a year ago, with some doing so quite well and others unfortunately missing the mark. With so much change over the past year, we decided it was time to update our rankings. We asked six of our writers for their thoughts on the current hierarchy of NBA Team Twitter. Here are the results: