This year’s NBA Finals saw a spike in television ratings from a season ago. It also reaped the rewards from a massive social media spike as well.
The league topped two billion video plays during the NBA Finals which accounts for a 19% increase over last year. The Finals MVP, Steph Curry, accounted for 28% of the entire league’s social media video plays. That means roughly 5.6 billion video plays were of Steph Curry making magic happen in the Finals.
The numbers looked even better compared to the two seasons previous to 2021. The number of social media video plays was up 45% from 2020 (the Covid Bubble Finals) and up 56% from 2019 (Warriors/Toronto Raptors).
The vast majority of the NBA’s video success came from Instagram Reels. That featured a tally of 716 million views, accounting for 60% of the total NBA social views during the Finals. The NBA also surpassed 88 million YouTube views. That represents a jump of 60% from last season and a 47% increase from 2020.
The NBA drew 61 million visits to it’s league-relate sites and apps (i.e. NBA.com, NBA app). That number was also up from 2021 by a measure of 13%.
There could be several factors to account for this including the participation by two very high-profile teams. However, the NBA thrives in the social media and digital marketing side of attention-grabbing. They are very aggressive when it comes to marketing their major events and stars and this year, it paid dividends.
