PR N°57 - FIBA reaches new digital heights with 2014 Basketball World Cup

USA vs Serbia, 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup, Madrid (Spain), Final , 14 September 2014

MIES (2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup) - As well as being a resounding success on the courts, the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup turned out to also be a huge hit across all of FIBA’s digital platforms.

FIBA offered a complete and innovative digital experience to engage and entertain all the fans during its flagship event.

FIBA Secretary General and International Olympic Committee (IOC) Member Patrick Baumann said: "The accomplishments and milestones achieved during the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup prove that we have established a very strong presence on digital platforms. Moving forward, FIBA will continue to bring our events closer to our fans using innovative digital tools. Basketball is a young sport with youth fans and we always have to keep in mind having the most efficient way possible to reach our audience across the globe."

On FIBA's YouTube Channel, the more than 500 videos from Spain 2014 resulted in over 30 million views and the channel doubled its number of subscribers with more than 126,000 people now following FIBA on the platform.

Claude Ruibal, Global Head of Sports for YouTube said: "Spain 2014 was a sensational event for FIBA and for YouTube. The FIBA digital team created tons of audience engagement by posting lots of high quality clips and highlights that helped fans get a broader and deeper connection with the game."

Posts on FIBA's Facebook page reached 189 million people and received more than 5 million likes.

Meanwhile, more than 4.3 million tweets about the FIBA Basketball World Cup were sent during the tournament, with 866,000 of them using the official hashtag #Spain2014. The 360 degree vine videos of the winning teams generated a huge engagement and were played over 3 million times.

FIBA.com/Spain2014 had 33 million visits and 90 million page views over the course of the tournament.

The FIBA Game Center App was downloaded more than 250,000, generating 1.4 million visits and 8.5 million page views.

The 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup also saw the launch of two world premieres for the International Basketball Federation and witnessed excellent traffic across its various social media channels.

For the first time ever, FIBA teamed up with Twitter to create the functionality @FIBA Scores. By tweeting '@FIBA scores', fans got live scores from every game throughout the tournament and found out in in real time how their favourite team was performing. This proved to be a big success, with 50,000 tweets and 10,000 re-tweets generated.

The second innovation saw the launch of the second screen App "FIBA REPLAY", which enabled fans to replay the best actions from the biggest games (Quarter-Finals, Semi-Finals, Third-Place Game and Final) from multiple camera angles.