The NBA is the new benchmark for Digital engagement

One of the drawbacks of being an American sports fan in Europe is the fact that you have to make choices which sports you want watch, especially since there will be something on all the time. I unfortunately made the choice not to watch Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals live, but you can be sure that I will watch the entire replay as soon as I can and probably many times after that. This season was about as good as it gets on the court, culminating in the city of Cleveland breaking a 52 year championship drought.

As the season comes to a close I feel like I was part of it, not only last night, but all season long. The NBA’s Digital presence is like no other. In April they became the first sports league to gain one million followers on Vine, in December they became the first organisation to surpass one billion loops on Vine. And when I say I feel like I was there, it was because every morning when I woke up I could go onto Vine and be sure that there would be a steady stream of monster dunks and other highlights available.

Now you could say that this would be the same for every sport, but the biggest league in the world, the National Football League (NFL) cracked down on social sharing, even successfully requesting to shut down popular media outlets such as SB Nation and Deadspin briefly on Twitter. This has its effect on the social following of the NFL. Even though their revenue is almost threefold of the NBA, they have a million followers less and not even a tenth of the loops of the NBA. The result is that the NBA has become more of a part of people’s lives on a daily basis than the NFL, even for those in Europe that don’t stay up until 06:00 to watch a game [...read the full blog post over on Capgemini.com..]