NBA.com launched a Facebook experience for the All-Star game this weekend. Called All-Star Pulse, it tracked real-time conversations about the players, stars and brands associated with the annual event. But in a twist — it used Facebook, not Twitter.
As far as trending topics go, the NBA.com experience is one of the best we’ve seen. The numbers update in real-time, and clicking any of the topics, like Kobe…
… brings up a topics page with lots of video clips, articles and blog posts. So why Facebook and not Twitter? “[The NBA] is such a global brand and with Facebook’s huge and ever growing universe we thought it made sense to visualize all the activity from Facebook,” an NBA source told Mashable, adding that Twitter already has trending topics.
The NBA has 7.4 million Facebook fans and another 2.3 million Twitter followers — and that’s just the league itself, not all the players and teams.
By the way, the game was the highest rated since 2003, with 9.1 million viewers.