Across Major League Baseball and the NBA, NFL and NHL, the team mobile application landscape is surprisingly fragmented. While teams in the NBA, NFL and NHL largely put out their own apps, all 30 MLB teams enjoy the universal platform of MLB Advanced Media’s Ballpark and At Bat applications, meaning that there are no true, stand-alone MLB team apps. That is not to say that there are no social features worth mentioning in MLBAM’s offering. Quite the opposite, as the revamped Ballpark app includes highly connected features like a ballpark journal tool that tracks a fan’s win/loss record at attended games and shares this information to social networks.
MLB aside, this article focuses on team-specific innovations, and the offerings are diverse for the NBA, NFL and NHL. The teams in those three leagues work with a range of developers, and feature sets vary greatly. Most teams include social media within their app, but many of these integrations are mediocre at best. Here are six team apps with social features that separate them from the pack.
Brooklyn Nets
■ Developer: WillowTree
■ Social innovation: The Nets use Instagram as an image stream and a promotional tool for driving revenue within their mobile app. Posts featuring merchandise and ticket deals are sprinkled throughout the feed, boosting the likelihood of conversion. Sponsor marks and hashtags are also attached to posts, broadening the reach of these partnerships. Sadly, these images are static, so fans cannot reply or retweet to posts within the app.
Winnipeg Jets
■ Developer: NeuLion
■ Social innovation: The Jets get creative with their use of in-app social by including a sponsored social hub with three separate feeds. Fans can post their photos to the #GOJETSGO feed, view the @NHLJets Twitter handle or even follow @MickEMoose_00 within the app. The team also boasts an in-app YouTube section with select clips from Jets TV, player highlights and top goals. This is one of the few team apps that includes a YouTube feature, and the Jets do a nice job with it.
San Francisco 49ers
■ Developer: Adept Mobile
■ Social innovation: Using the digital community management tool #tagboard, the 49ers promote hashtags like #49ersinvasion to pull all relevant posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, Vine and Flickr into a single social feed for fans. Network posts can be individually turned on or off in the feed with a tap of an icon, which is a nice bonus. Fans can also interact with all #tagboard content without leaving the screen they are on.
Cleveland Browns
■ Developer: DoApp
■ Social innovation: The Browns bring a fresh integration with short video clip network Vine into their app’s social media section. No registration is required to view the content from Vine, so fans can quickly scroll through the clips. All vines can be liked, revined or shared to Twitter or Facebook within the integration, and the team effectively uses hashtags like #DawgPound and #WeBarkTogether to drive audience engagement.
Detroit Pistons
■ Developer: B3Connect
■ Social innovation: The Pistons offer a sponsored, filterable Twitter feed, where fans can view the tweets they want: official team tweets only, fan tweets only, or all tweets. This is a nice way to clean up a messy feed and make overindulgers disappear. Fans can reply, retweet or compose a new tweet with prepopulated hashtags #Pistons and #DetroitPistons within the comfort of the app.
Los Angeles Kings
■ Developer: NeuLion
■ Social innovation: In the team’s in-app Instagram feed, photos are presented in a stacked, scrollable format with captions and sharing tools. This is a refreshing integration that makes the photo-based social network’s content more digestible, as images are larger and cleaner. The team also has its Twitter section broken out by handle. Presently, there are six handles for users to view, including @LAKings and @LAKingsIceCrew. Fans can interact with all social media posts without leaving the app.
Amie Sheridan is a writer in Philadelphia.
