The first full year of Baseball, Softball and Baseball5 events since the pandemic helped to create a stronger social media presence for the WBSC. After expanding the organisations social media horizons in 2021 by launching new platforms, the WBSC took steps to create a strong bond with the fans in 2022 across these platforms whilst doing the same on the traditional ones.
With almost the whole WBSC environment in action during 2022 with four Baseball World Cups, one Women's Softball World Championship title awarded at The World Games, the maiden edition of the Baseball5 World Cup and the Blind Baseball International Cup as well as the debut of the Virtual World Cup, helped the WBSC Social Media Channels surpass 990,000 followers.
The hottest social media platform for the WBSC during 2022 was TikTok. Having started the year with 4,500 followers, it exploded to number 40,000 followers 12 months later. The video-based platform proved to be most popular with younger audiences while the most successful post of the year came from the Baseball5 World Cup, a presentation of the discipline's GOAT - Cuba’s Briandy Molina.
Facebook remains as the biggest WBSC social media presence, with a following that surpassed 573K people, representing a 9% growth from 2021.
One of the milestones for WBSC social media during 2022 was the WBSC Twitter account surpassing 100,000 followers. While Instagram maintained its impressive growth, reaching the 84K followers marking a 25% growth during 2022.
Instagram proved to have the highest engagement of all the WBSC social media platforms. In March, the most successful content on this platform reached 2.6 million views.
YouTube kept its growing pace from 2021, with 20,000 new subscribers, representing a 13% increase in the channel that allows our fans to watch and enjoy the highlights from WBSC tournaments while live streaming and games on demand were available on the WBSC's OTT channel - GameTime.
The Global Game, the WBSC Official Podcast, kept growing during 2022, seeing names like the new baseball sensation Genevieve Beacom tell her story about her debut in the Australian Baseball League or the softball legend Monica Abbott doing a recap of her career.
During 2022, the WBSC also found different ways to engage with international baseball and softball athletes around the world such as using Spotify to find out what music could WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup MVP, USA’s Bryce Eldridge like? Listen to the playlist that Bryce put together for our Spotify profile.
With a heavily packed calendar for 2023, the expectation is to keep growing and make it a stronger presence on social media for WBSC and allow the fans to follow all the action in every WBSC tournament.
