In the United States, (American) football is king. An entire day of the week, Sunday, is devoted to the National Football League (NFL), but if you take into account Friday night’s high school football games, Saturday’s college football games, and the NFL’s Monday and Thursday night games, in the fall, Americans are practically always watching football.
Sports And Social Media, A Changing Landscape Of Fanatical Fans [Infographic]
The landscape for major league sports is changing, not in board rooms and locker rooms but rather online. As social media has become more prevalent players are taking to social media networks like Facebook and Twitter in droves and their fans are following right around, creating a fast acting, viral system of support and camaraderie for athletes in various sports.
In celebration of sports new found home a top social media networks the sports medicine company KT Tape has created an awesome infographic that shows how social media has changed the sports we watch and the players we idolize.
Exactly how popular has sports and social media become when wrapped together? When Tim Tebow through an 80-yard lob last year to move the Denver Broncos into the playoffs he broke a Twitter record with 9,000 tweets per second mentioning his name. Then there was Jeremy Lin, a relatively unknown player who’s early season play for the New York Knicks led to the term “Linsanity” and eventually 550,000 followers in a single month.
Social media in sports also isn’t just leveraged in the United States, soccer players Kaka and Ronaldo have become the most followed athletes on Twitter. [Read more…]
Will The Super Bowl Dominate The Twittersphere?
With Superbowl 45 less than a few weeks away, Twitter has highlighted some interesting stats regarding the effect of one of the most watched games in the US upon the twittersphere.
Last year, during key moments of Super Bowl XLIV, about 40% of all Tweets were related to the game. As the game ended, this number was closer to 50%. This year, one-third of the players who were in the NFL playoffs are on Twitter. And, at some points during last Sunday’s AFC and NFC championship games, virtually all trends were football-related. (Official Twitter Blog)
While these stats are impressive, truth be told the World Cup in June of 2010 still holds the record for the highest number of tweets sent per second, and it will be interesting to see if the Superbowl will be able to top that due to the social network’s popularity amongst the sporting crowd.
Twitter has also announced a strategic partnership with the NFL as well as VISA, which should make it easier to track how popular certain topics are within the twittersphere (note: as of this moment the Pittsburgh Steelers are edging out Greenbay Packers in mentions).
Whether or not Superbowl 45 surpasses the previous record set by the World Cup has yet to be seen, although hopefully Twitter’s new data center will be able to handle the load without encountering any fail whales or slow downs this year.
The Inquisitr Hires Sport Blogger, Syndicates Celeb Content
Duncan Riley has announced the addition of Paul Montgomery as the in-house sports writer on The Inquisitr. Montgomery is a journalist by trade, and with the addition the site now features a dedicated sports category.
Riley also announced a syndication deal with BANG Showbiz, which means that The Inquisitr can run up to ten stories from their celebrity content stock, as an addition to the regular celebrity coverage. Finally, Riley also announced a deal with GumGum for celebrity photography. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, especially the syndication deal.
As for traffic, Riley reports that pageviews are down in June, 2.7 million to 2.55. He calls it a comfortable level.
AOL Launches Spanish-Language Sports Blog
The guys at work are always going nuts about football. Honestly, I have no clue what they are talking about. The same way I have no idea what Fánaticos is talking about. Perhaps that’s because my Spanish-speaking education ended in the eighth grade.
AOL has launched a new blog under their AOL Latino division. The
Spanish-language blog covers football/soccer, baseball and boxing from the United States, Mexico, Latin America and Spain.
Nine sports bloggers comprise the editorial launch team.
Interestingly enough, the ads served are in English, while all of the content is in Spanish. Even more interesting is the fact that AOL is launching a new blog after shutting down some other venues due to ‘budget cuts.’ I wonder if these new bloggers are working for free?
