Last week, SportsBusiness Daily released a survey of sports teams and their social media followers.  Soccer giants FC Barcelona and Real Madrid are neck-and-neck at the top, followed closely by Manchester United.  The Lakers are the lone American representative in the top 5 followed by London’s storied franchise, Arsenal.  Overall, of the 20 individual sports teams in terms of largest combined Facebook and Twitter audiences, nine of them, including the top three and seven of the top eight, are soccer teams from England, Spain or Turkey.

In terms of baseball, the Phillies reign supreme on Twitter, but finish #3 overall behind the Yankees and Red Sox.  As for the IWS home teams?  Well let’s just say they’re not very social – Washington is last and Arizona is second-to-last. Even our largest sports social media client, Phillies Nation has more followers than those perennial cellar dwellers.

Nonetheless, it’s becoming increasingly clear that if you want to be big on social media, you need to think internationally – and social media makes it easy.  Everyone is on Facebook; well, at least 500 million people or one-twelfth of the world’s population are.  Advanced social media strategies must evolve to take advantage of this specific opportunity. SBD offers MLB Advanced Media as an example, quoting Bob Bowman its chief executive,

“We have an overarching strategy that we want Facebook users to become baseball fans, and not necessarily the other way around.  And beyond sheer numbers, we want to grow our [social media] users in two dimensions, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and be truly engaged.”

The second sentence makes him sound like a clueless CEO, but the first sentence – that is spot on.  The low-hanging fruit of followers is easy pickings for a social media strategy; it’s converting the unripe prospects that should the main focus.   The teams at the top of these lists are the most recognizable teams worldwide and they have an international social media strategy.  Do you?

See the full list of MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, world club and league leaders at SportsBusiness Daily.

This past week baseball fans from around the world voted for players to make the final spot on their respective league’s roster. All told, 68 million votes were cast. Shane Victorino, the winner of the National League roster spot, received over 15 millions votes. He narrowly edged out Pablo Sandoval who had the support of both his San Francisco and Venezuela fan bases. Our friend John McCain backed another losing effort in his endorsement of the third-place finisher, Arizona’s Mark Reynolds.

In the American League, Brandon Inge of Detroit benefited from the “Bran Torino” alliance formed with Victorino supporters. Both Inge and Victorino were in second place in the early stages of voting when their campaigns teamed up to support each other.

Fans were allowed to vote an unlimited amount of times for both a National League and American League representative; they only needed to submit their name, age, email address, and a challenge-response question consisting of 5 squwiggly numbers. MLB teased fans throughout the 4 days of voting by releasing percentage results and claiming different players overtook the lead each night.

This is a win-win situation in online engagement. MLB is collecting millions of email addresses from people who more than happy to give them. It played on civic and national pride to give people incentive to participate and provided tangible results. MLB also offered a rudimentary widget to help the campaigns go viral and it did. Blogs, local organizations and even governments got involved to support the GOTV effort.

For all the hype surrounding last week’s campaign, the entire idea (voting for an All-Star spot) and functionality (an online poll) contrived by MLB remained very simple. Yet it was one of the most effective methods to engage people online and build an email list.