Twitter Global Head of Sports Partnerships Laura Froelich poses with Mr Garcia, the winner of the Twitter Trophy on 2017 Oaks Day in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Paul Rovere/Getty Images)
NEW YORK — Having started at the top of the North American sporting landscape with its 2016 NFL streaming deal, Twitter has gained the confidence of having produced a “best-in-class product” and has grown an understanding of its unique standing in the broadcast rights marketplace, said Laura Froelich, the network’s global head of sports partnerships.
“We learned that we have the ability to curate a conversation that is incredibly powerful that complements the live content, so our hypothesis was proven true,” she told SportTechie at the conclusion of the recent Twitter Sports Summit.
“The power of Twitter, the fact that people are coming to our platform to experience games in the moment and that conversation around them at the same time, that really, truly is Twitter’s value proposition and it is exemplified in what we’re able to do with live (sports).”
After Amazon plucked away the Thursday Night Football rights, Twitter was left without its signature sporting property. In the meantime, the social site has broadcast weekly MLB, NHL and National League Lacrosse games in addition to live coverage of the WNBA and PGA Tour, as well as in-car perspectives from the NASCAR playoffs and 17 esports tournaments.
“We are going to continue to stake our rightful place, which is the place where people go to see what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about in the moment,” Froelich said. “We are unique in that respect.”
Twitter’s internal research indicates that its activity during sporting events grows by a larger share than the social chatter on other platforms. Froelich shared one specific example: the Halo esports world championship was livestreamed on Twitter, Facebook and Twitch, garnering a total audience of 13 million, of which the vast majority — 10.2 million — chose Twitter.
Esports clearly targets a younger demographic, and Twitter reported that its NFL viewership data also skewed that way, with 55 percent of those tuning in under the age of 25.
“As we know, audiences are becoming more and more elusive as people are cutting the cord,” Froelich said. “Really, our partners are looking for ways that they can continue to reach that younger audience, and they find them on our platform.”
Two buzzwords at Twitter right now are curation and discovery: culling the best conversation for presentation alongside a livestream and ensuring that users are exposed to content in which they may have interest. Twitter has rich internal metrics on users — “a treasure trove of signals from our audience,” as Froelich described it — to help pair stated interests (based on followed accounts and favorited tweets, for instance) with promoted material, livestreams and other tweeted content. The Happening Now feature is designed with sports fans in mind.
Twitter need not search far and wide for ideas on what broadcast rights to pursue next; an inward search should suffice. Golf fans, for instance, often bemoaned not seeing the early hours of a tournament before TV networks began their coverage, so Twitter struck a partnership to stream the first 60-to-90 minutes on Thursdays and Fridays. The same goes for esports: fans seemed to watch on Twitch but discuss on Twitter, prompting the social site to condense the two by hosting the stream itself.
“As we listen to the conversation on Twitter and see where the avid fandom is, the appetite for the content, we’ll focus on getting that kind of content for fans,” Froelich said.
Right now, one key realization is the international scope of its audiences. A quarter of Twitter’s NFL viewers were international. When a WNBA game attracted 1.1 million viewers, 60 percent were overseas. The majority of the NBA’s vast social audience is from outside the U.S. And Twitter is streaming more international events. Among them: the Melbourne Cup, the top horse race in Australia; the Singapore Cup, a major soccer tournament in that country; and Senbatsu, the wildly popular National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament of Japan.
Theo Luke, Twitter’s sports partnership director for Europe and the Middle East, recently reinforced this idea at Leaders Week in London, describing sports as the top conversation topic in the United Kingdom — even outpacing Brexit and Donald Trump’s election by a factor of two.
“What you find as you get closer to a live game is our usage spikes as people want to interact with the live experience,” Luke said, according to LiveMint. “The space we operate in and pound for pound where we are doing really well in is the live environment and that is why live clips and live videos make so much sense to us.”
Relatedly, Twitter is exploring the idea of making snippets of key moments of games available on its platform with micropayments, rather than streaming only the entirety of games. And expect to find more and more resources poured into the international reach.
Maurizio Barbieri, head of sports partnerships for Southeast Asia at Twitter, recently told The Drum, “I always say that in this part of the world, you support your local team plus one or two teams from an overseas league. We are all fans of Manchester United and some other team. These are based on the conversations we see on Twitter. Esports goes across borders and demographics as well, motorsports where Indonesians are crazy about MotorGP, badminton is very popular in Indonesia and Malaysia, and basketball in Philippines.”
