This week, the Los Angeles Lakers became the first North American sports franchise to reach 11 million fans on Facebook. The accomplishment makes the Lakers fourth in the world in terms of Facebook popularity for sports teams, behind the European football clubs FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Manchester United; each of which have roughly twice as many Facebook fans as the Lakers.

Number of Facebook fans / likes has long been the standard for which most sports teams, and other business entities, measure their success on the social networking site. In recent months however, savvy online sports marketers have been using additional key performance indicators to measure the pulse of their audiences. Facebook is constantly changing how content is delivered to users, and like it or not, messages from business pages are often never delivered to a fan’s feed at all. In the case of FC Barcelona, what good are 23 million+ fans if you do not know how those fans are consuming and engaging with your brand?

When you look at how many people are talking about each sports team compared to how many likes they have accumulated, and the rate at which their fans are talking about them (mentions divided by the number of fans), a much different picture of who the most popular sports team on Facebook is emerges....