This season Facebook worked with the NCAA and numerous tournament teams to bring fans live content. They also teamed up with Turner to stream tonight’s game live in virtual reality via Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset.
Clearly Facebook is making a big push into live sports as it positions itself to become not just a content sharing platform, but also a content publishing platform for live content.
To recap, Facebook’s partnership with Turner will create the first virtual reality livestream of the NCAA Championship game in college basketball. This will be done by Facebook’s Oculus showing the game with a 180 degree courtside view that will also have a scoreboard built into the “reality”. On top of this, Turner will also upload 360 degree highlight videos to the official NCAA March Madness Facebook Page.
On their impressive roads to the championship, both Villanova and UNC have understandably seen strong social growth and engagement with their fan bases. In fact, Facebook has reported that since going live on Selection Sunday, Villanova’s viewership has grown each time they stream live with 26k viewers initially to 79k viewers for their most recent stream. From their experience, UNC has seen six-figure viewership of every live stream to this point.
In all, twenty-three teams went “Live” with Faceook (including all four Final Four teams) and as a result provided their fans with more than one hundred unique live streams in total to create some cool behind the scenes access of their teams living out their athletic dreams. The content ranged from fans seeing their favorite teams, players and coaches preparing for games, locker room celebrations and more.
Lynnea Phillips, Social Media Coordinator, University of North Carolina Athletics is happy with how Facebook Live has helped her engage with UNC fans in ways she was not previously able to do.
“I was able to connect with Nick Marquez (from Facebook) during the middle of the season and we were able to discuss some of the newer technology options that Facebook has to offer. We discussed Facebook frames, Facebook Live, Instagram accounts, the frequency of posts, etc. Facebook Live has been great for us in the sense that we can now bring the people that like our page into the experience of the event we’re covering. We have one of the most liked Facebook pages in college athletics and our Facebook fanbase reaches much larger than North Carolina and even the United States, so it’s important that we’re able to connect with fans outside of our local area — Facebook Live helps us accomplish that.”
Phillips also went on to share some of her favorite moments of the Tournament that were shared via Facebook Live: “We’ve really been trying to increase the type of content that we share on Facebook and have recently been sharing more GIFs, videos, and Facebook live videos. Some of our farthest reaching videos are from Facebook Live. The Sweet Sixteen sendoff video is a surprising favorite. We had been advertising the event across numerous platforms for a few days and we wanted to give fans that weren’t on site a way to join in the festivities — not only is that a favorite moment but also what makes my job special, in general.”
What have your favorite Facebook Like videos been during the tournament? For your viewing pleasure, here are some of the best Live videos from the Tournament thus far:
Villanova and Oklahoma at the Final Four: Taking The Court at Final Four
UNC at the Final Four: UNC Taking the Court
Top LIVE moments:
- UNC Fans Gather for Team Send-Off
- Behind-The-Scenes at Villanova Promo Shoot
- Behind-The-Scenes at UNC Promo Shoot
- Texas A&M Live In Locker Room Following Comeback
- Oregon’s Mascot Taking Over
- Live Q&A Session with Syracuse Players
- Stephen F. Austin Live in Locker Room Following Win