New research suggests that it is extremely beneficial for professional sports teams to engage people with their brands through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Researchers at the University of Missouri and Louisiana State University found that that the more individual teams released original content from their Twitter accounts, such as score updates or player profiles, the more followers they gained and engagement they initiated. The researchers say their findings could provide guidance for many businesses struggling with how to use social media.

"The common way of thinking for businesses, including professional sports is that they need to be on social media," Brian Soebbing, a coauthor on the study, said in a statement. "However, little research has been done on how businesses and organizations can maximize their consumer engagement and interaction on social media, and thus, very few best practices exist that are backed by research."

For the study, researchers analyzed the Twitter accounts of all 30 MLB teams over 13 consecutive months. By monitoring the daily rise and fall in the number of followers for each team's account and combining those trends with the amount of activity from each account, the researchers were able to determine which activities led to gaining more Twitter followers.

They found that daily increases in content creation and differences in team success on the field caused little change in the number of Twitter followers. However, they found that larger trends made significant differences in fan engagement and total followers for each account.

"We found that trends such as an increased number of total tweets from an account over a long period of time, as well as long winning streaks, overall winning percentage, and how often teams played on national television all helped increase the number of followers a team had on its Twitter account," researcher Grace Yan said in a statement. "On the other hand, long losing streaks and fewer tweets in general correlated with losses in total numbers of followers."

This change shows that while teams' social media producers can't necessarily control success on the field, they can make a difference in maintaining fans by continuing to create social media content to engage existing fans and potentially bring in new ones.

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Sport Management.