"@NBA" on Twitter

I love summer and all that it promises but the fact that the NBA season ends and the NFL season doesn’t start until September is enough to make me yearn for Fall to come sooner. Thankfully, my addiction to Twitter has been able to feed my NBA hunger, even if it’s not always basketball-related.

As a “soon-to-be Marketing Professional,” (LOL) social media in and of itself has become a serious interest of mine. I’ve become a Twitter-freak, following all sorts of random people from Around the Horn’s Tony Reali to big-named Marketing execs to Martha Stewart to, of course, NBA players.

Honestly, I only got into Twitter initially because my brother couldn’t stop talking about how funny Shaq was. Following Shaq led me to follow Steve Nash who led me to follow Baron Davis…and now, almost half of the people I follow are in the NBA.

I haven’t seen much updates from Shaq recently but I’m assuming it has to do with his transition to Cleveland. Dwight Howard always brightens up my day with absolute randomness, like the time he broke his bed due to imitating a Keri Hilsen video. I first heard about Michael Jackson’s death from Shawn Marion. Charlie Villanueva, while not the most popular NBA player, has become of my favorite people to follow, especially since he personally replied to a comment I said about how I didn’t want a Lakers-Cavs Finals.

I can go longer about my NBA experiences via Twitter but I’ll stop there for now.

Twitter and other social media channels have the power to make people and things that used to seem so above us now be almost at our own level. I see the NBA players that I follow as actual people, who go through BS, who like to laugh about silly things, who don’t always have the best days. They are offering to share themselves with the rest of the world and I love it.

On another note, the NBA just reached 1 million followers, being the only other brand besides Whole Foods to reach that monumental number. The people who do social media for the NBA are pretty savvy; while the GS Warriors simply tweet up links of articles published about them, the NBA shares a number of videos, random stats, different featured profiles, and other things that makes me continue to be a follower. And they kept their word when they said they’d do a special shoutout to whoever ended up being their 1 millionth follower, no matter who it was.

I would do anything to be on the NBA’s social media team.