It’s that time of year where the Little League World Series (LLWS) returns to Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Over the last week and a half, eight teams from the United States and eight international teams took to the diamond in the 73rd edition of the Little League World Series. On Sunday, we saw this year’s tournament come to an end, with the team from Louisiana defeating Curacao 8-0. With the amount of buzz generated across social by this tournament, we used the Zoomph platform to measure and analyze content around the Little League World Series.
Social Summary
As seen from the social summary above, the conversation around the tournament was extremely active. From tweets about players’ sportsmanship, the games, events, sponsors, and the excitement alone, there were few dull moments. Shown by the 2.7 billion impressions over the tracked period of August 15th until August 25th, it’s easy to see just how popular the event was.
Top Activity
Looking our activity chart, there were several spikes in the social activity over the span of the tournament. However, these spikes should come as no surprise. The first spike came on Sunday, August 18th, the date of the third Little League Classic. This day has been popular on social all three years as the players of the teams competing in the Classic spend the morning at the Little League World Series with the players, sometimes even joining in on the antics like Anthony Rizzo did this year. The other spike in activity came on championship Sunday, with almost 19,000 posts coming through the Zoomph feed. This might provide strong insight on when sponsors want to make their activation pushes on social to reach the most eyes.
Little League Classic
Mentioned above, this year was the third time the Little League Classic has taken place in Williamsport. This has been a notorious day on social three years running, as the players of the MLB teams (this year the Pirates and Cubs) arriving in the morning at the Little League World Series complex and taking in the games with the LLWS players, and is capped off by the LLWS players attending a game between the two MLB teams at a minor league field in Williamsport.
This year’s event drove in over $27K in social impression value. To no surprise, the top mentioned accounts in the filtered feed for the Little League Classic were the Cubs and Pirates official accounts. However, the top influencer of that day was Jordan Bastian of MLB.com.
Sponsors
Over the course of the week, there were many sponsors who saw social impression values of six figures or above. At the top of the list was ESPN, who was the TV broadcast provider for the entire tournament. Over the time of the tournament, ESPN garnered a social impression value of over $1 million through owned and earned content. Also on the list was T-Mobile, who sponsored the first annual Little League Home Run Derby. Through the event, T-Mobile was able to generate a social impression value of over $250,000.
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