Facebook Sports Stadium To Help Fans Join In On The Conversation

According to Facebook, its roughly 1.5 billion users include 650 million sports fans around the world, so there’s plenty of potential demand for a feature that gives you “the feeling you’re watching the game with your friends even when you aren’t together”.

Facebook is on an ongoing mission to become a hub for all things social and communication, and its latest step is the Facebook Sports Stadium, which allows users to follow games and commentary around them. In real time, you can read your friends’ comments about sports teams, and watch plays. “This product makes connecting over sports more fun and engaging, and we’ll continue listening to feedback to make it even better”.

There’s another potential benefit to Facebook’s Stadium feature: It might attract more sports influencers and journalists now using other platforms (like Twitter) to share their insights during big games. We’ll see in the coming weeks if Facebook Sports takes off, starting with the AFC and NFC championships on Sunday.

Facebook this morning launched Sports Stadium, which at first glance appears to be its own version of Twitter’s Moments, but specifically for sports.

Facebook has long argued that it’s a great place to talk about live TV while watching live TV, including big-time sporting events.

Initially rolled out for American football games, the feature will be available to other sports such as soccer, basketball and more in the near term. The new stomping ground for sports fans serves up a chronological stream of posts and comments from friends. Sports Stadium is not an app, but rather a feature built into the Facebook app. In order to access it, all you’d have to do is search for the game and you should be able to access its Sports Stadium page. About 55 percent of Facebook news users saw posts about the same topic.

The idea behind it is to provide real-time updates, statistics, commentary and fan posts on major sporting events. Investors have clearly paid attention to this issue: Facebook shares are up 21% in the past year; Twitter is down more than 54%.

We think it can really enhance awareness.