NBA: Twitter and Facebook communities of the franchises (October 2017)

The 30 franchises of the NBA had a cumulative total of 157.65 million fans on the social network Facebook, on 01/10/2017, an average of 5.25 million "likes" per team of the North American professional basketball league, whose 2017-18 season begins on 17/10/2017. This represents 653,185 less "likes" for the 30 teams (-0.4%) compared to 01/09/2017, an average of 21,773 less per franchise.

A total of 28 of the 30 franchises (93.3% of the teams in the league) saw their "like" entries decline in September 2017. After an overall increase in June 2017, the decrease has continued since July 2017: 27 of the 30 teams (90% of the total) had fewer "likes" on 01/10/2017 than three months ago, and all clubs lost 1.1 million "likes" since 01/07/2017 (-0.7%). This overall and continuous decrease can be explained by a "cleanup" by Facebook, which removes the "likes" given by "bots" (robots) or by inactive or even deactivated accounts.

NBA franchises had 53.46 million followers on the micro-blogging platform Twitter on 01/10/2017, an average of 1.78 million per team. This represented a total…