An Inside Look at the Spredfast-Powered FIFA Social Hub

By Adam Flomenbaum 

Screen Shot 2014-06-23 at 11.33.21 AMOf the numerous World Cub social hubs launched ahead of this year’s games, the official one hosted by FIFA – in partnership with Adidas – may be the most visually impressive.

FIFA Social Hub, powered by social TV company Spredfast, shows the top trending players and teams. Clicking into these player and team cards, users are shown Twitter stats such as mentions per hour, tweets per minute, and the player’s or team’s own social activity.

Fans can also see the social activity around the world displayed on an interactive map, and can post to Twitter or Facebook directly from the hub.

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For more on the FIFA Social Hub, we spoke with Brian Foley, Senior Director of Global Sports at Spredfast.

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Lost Remote: How does this social hub differ from the other World Cup social hubs we’ve been seeing? 

Brian Foley: What makes the social hub unique is that it has a number of features, including a sortable trending piece up top that can arrange by team or player in a grid or list view. This activation is changing constantly because of the volume of matches, which requires a sophisticated coding/stable platform to execute.

The Mosaic at the bottom is customized so that it can be filtered by the user in a number of different ways; for instance – if you’re only interested in viewing content about the USA team or seeing what fans are saying about the upcoming Netherlands vs. Chile match, you can customize those Mosaic views.

Adidas sponsored tiles that are integrated throughout the Mosaic and pop out to show social content that includes their brand. Adidas has access to control and swap in/out various modules like a poll or fill in the blank, along with their mosaic. All of these elements are then layered into the team and player pages. We’ve layered social into match pages (high traffic) and all of this is done in six languages (including Arabic) with similar visualizations in the official app that we power.

LR: How will Adidas ultimately benefit from this partnership?

Foley: Adidas benefits by having interactive modules to promote user-generated content, with the incredibly high volume of impressions that social experiences attract, that’s a big impact.  It also allows Adidas to activate their sponsorship in a more dynamic, and innovative way as it’s living/breathing vs. just standard digital ad buys.  With ever-changing content and personalized experiences, we’re creating a habit for fans – the ultimate social destination for the event. 

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