Facebook is increasing its focus on sports after the social network announced a new feature to enable users to follow games and commentary around them.
The newest feature that has been added by Facebook to its ecosystem is the ‘Facebook Sports Stadium’ to allow users to follow live matches as well as, comment and discuss them with their friends and other enthusiasts.
According to the social media giant, the new feature will allow users to see posts and comments from friends, live scores, stats and a play-by-play, game information, and posts and commentary from experts, like teams, leagues and journalists, with easy access to their Facebook Pages.
“With 650 million sports fans, Facebook is the world’s largest stadium. People already turn to Facebook to celebrate, commiserate, and talk trash with their friends and other fans,” said Steve Kafka, Product Manager at Facebook.
“Now we’ve built a place devoted to sports so you can get the feeling you’re watching the game with your friends even when you aren’t together,” he added.
It’s worth noting that Twitter has been hailed as the perfect medium to date to follow live updates and reactions about live events, sports and other TV broadcasts. Facebook clearly wants to take a chunk of that pie as it strives to create an all-inclusive social ecosystem which would not need its users to leave to fulfil their social and communication needs.
On Tuesday, Facebook also announced a partnership with Nielsen which will incorporate the site’s user conversation data into Nielsen’s social TV ratings. This arguably implies that Facebook is betting big on making live TV commentary a staple on its platform which could possibly be a great move for advertising.
Sports and big games, in particular, have traditionally yielded the most valuable advertising spots, so it’s no surprise that Facebook would want to leverage that.
The feature is currently limited to the US and for American football games, but the company says that it hopes to expand this to other games and countries soon.
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Simar Singh is one of the youngest members of the BW team. A fresh graduate from IIMC, she also holds a degree in political science from LSR. She enjoys covering power, startups, lifestyle and a little bit of tech.
