Where were you the night of April 27th, 2012?
I won’t soon forget getting off the couch that night, letting my dog out, and checking Twitter while I waited for her to come back inside. News had hit Twitter that Mike Trout was being called up (you may remember that Bryce Harper was called up just hours before Trout).
I quickly went to all my league sites and picked up Trout and Harper in any leagues in which they were still available.
The point of this story is that Twitter helped me win two of my leagues in 2012. It’s a great tool for alerting you to important fantasy events (injuries, call ups, closer changes) and aggregating fantasy news and articles from around the web.
The web is full of A TON of great and free fantasy baseball content and Twitter is an invaluable tool for helping you locate that information.
Getting Started
If you need a primer on Twitter, Brien Bonneville over at thefakebaseball.com has a great introduction and some tips for new users. As a technology lover, I especially like the suggestion to download and use a Twitter dashboard like TweetDeck. Twitter’s interface is a little clunky. Using a dashboard allows you to more efficiently access different features in Twitter, arrange and follow multiple streams, and access multiple Twitter accounts at once.
Who To Follow
For the last couple years, David Gonos has put out his list of 99 Fantasy Baseball Twitter Accounts You Should Follow. There are probably thousands of fantasy baseball Twitter accounts out there and Gonos has done a great job of isolating some of the best. You’ll see names like Matthew Berry, Jason Collette, Mike Gianella, Tristan Cockroft, and Ron Shandler on his top 99.
SFBB Tip – Twitter Lists
In my opinion, one of the most underutilized features on Twitter is “Lists”. A Twitter “List” allows you to group and organize Twitter users. You can subscribe to lists created by other Twitter users and others can subscribe to your own lists. When you then visit a list, the Tweets from everyone in the list are displayed.
Subscribing to a list is different than following someone. This is nice because you can easily segregate people you follow for personal reasons from others by using lists. For example, if you subscribe to one of the lists below, you won’t have MLB injury news cluttering up your Twitter stream. When you’re ready to do some fantasy baseball reading, you can then view the appropriate list.
Instead of you having to seek out fantasy baseball experts to follow, I’ve created created several Smart Fantasy Baseball Twitter lists you can follow. You can see all the SFBB lists here, or visit the individual lists with the links below:
How To Subscribe To a List
- After clicking on one of the links above, locate and click on the “Subscribe” button in the top left corner of the page.
- Keep in mind that lists you have subscribed to do not hit your Twitter feed. To view the contents of a list, after logging into Twitter, click on the “View my profile page” link.
- Then click on the “Lists>” link, in the top left corner, to see all lists you are subscribed to.
- On the ensuing page you will see all of your lists. The title of each list will be displayed along with who created it.
- Once you click to view a list, all the Tweets from members added to the list will appear in a feed for you to read.
- If you do make the jump to using a Twitter Dashboard, like Tweetdeck, you can add followed lists to the Dashboard and have them easily available (and avoid having to jump through these hoops above).
Who’s Missing?
Who are your favorite Twitter follows? Is there anyone missing from the lists that you think should be added? I don’t intend for the lists to be all encompassing, and I put a preference on quality over quantity. There are also some fantasy baseball experts that don’t tweet much about fantasy baseball, so I excluded them (Gonos’ list of 99 had some that I left off my lists for that reason).
Stay Smart. And thanks for reading.
