LiveLike Feature Spotlight: Live Chats

In 2024, sports leagues worldwide are prioritizing fan community-building more than ever before, turning to messaging, live chats, and community platforms to foster lasting global fan connections. Among the desire to foster fan communities, the rise of platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and YouTube Live highlights a growing trend in the sports industry: the shift towards creating personalized, community-based experiences for fans who can’t attend events in person.

These advanced messaging and live chat platforms are essential for real-time engagement, allowing fans to discuss, share, debate, and celebrate their favorite sports in real time, creating a unified global community. Discord channels, for example, provide all-in-one communication hubs for fans to connect over their shared passions, make new friends, and stay updated on the latest information.

Clubs like FC Barcelona and Manchester United have launched dedicated Discord communities where fans can join group chats, share multimedia content, and participate in voice and video calls. Similarly, WhatsApp partnerships, like those with Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 or Sky Sports, provide direct communication channels through dedicated broadcasts, delivering real-time message updates and new alerts, highlight reels, behind-the-scenes footage, and exclusive interviews. Fans can also participate in polls and surveys, enjoying the perks of a personalized one-to-many broadcast service.

However, brands in 2024 recognize the importance of integrating these features directly into their own platforms, and LiveLike’s innovative live chat feature offers this unique advantage. LiveLike live chat offers advanced messaging for private, public, and influencer group chats, with stickers, GIFs, reactions, videos, images, moderation capabilities, and more. Unlike third-party platforms, LiveLike integrates directly into an organization’s platform, allowing greater control over user experience, data, and branding—keeping fans engaged on their proprietary platforms.

By leveraging the capabilities of platforms like Discord and WhatsApp while offering a proprietary solution, LiveLike enables brands to cultivate a sense of belonging and connection among fans their way and ensure the excitement of a game is always just a chat message away.

Ways to Use Live Chats on Your Platform

Offering public chat for open group forums, private chat for one-on-one or select member discussions, and influencer chat featuring live sessions between industry leaders that fans can observe and react to, LiveLike live chats enable fans to connect their way over some of the biggest moments in real time.

LiveLike Live Chats can be integrated on top of any live content on your platform—including live video, live feeds—and live on any page of your platform, actionable through a CTA.

By leveraging these three main applications, many of our clients, including FloSport, Golden State Warriors, Bally’s, Gigset.io, CBN, NBA, and WNBA, have integrated our live chat solution to successfully engage fans on their platforms.

Private Chats: Fostering Personalized Interactions

Unlike Public Chat, our Private Chat feature is accessible only by code, link, or in-app invitations, allowing users to speak directly to other users of their choice in custom-created private group chats. These chats are assigned unique IDs that users must know to enter and send messages to those in each group.

Whether you’re connecting sports fans, students, or movie buffs, Private Chat is perfect for facilitating smaller discussion groups, one-on-ones, and more!

Private Chat Use Cases:

• NBA Digital: The NBA utilized our Private Chat feature to allow users to host private discussions with other fans of their choice during NBA Live games on Web, iOS, and Android applications.
• Gigset.io: Gigset used our Private Chat feature to allow fans to create dedicated, invite-only chat rooms for one-on-one or group conversations.

Public Group Chats: Enhancing Community Engagement

Public Chat capabilities present an open forum for your users to ask questions, leave comments, and share their love for the game, club, sport, or league with everyone in the community. Public chat is open to any user on the platform and offers a way for fans to discuss their shared passion, debate fandom differences, and share their knowledge of the industry with the entire community.

By allowing your users to communicate publicly with one another, you’ll create a feeling of belonging, open discussions to a wider fanbase, and connect like-minded fans around the world.

Public Chat Use Cases:

• Sports: FloSport, Bally’s, and the Golden State Warriors have all integrated our Public Chat feature into their platforms to improve the overall user experience. FloSport and Bally’s use public chat on top of their video content during live sports events, allowing users to post GIFs, stickers, and custom reactions. The Golden State Warriors added live chat rooms with custom emoji reaction capabilities to their Game Mode app, on top of their Match Center experience.
• Entertainment: Gigset and CBN have utilized our Public Chat feature to bring a sense of community and camaraderie to their audience members during live shows. Gigset integrated public chat during its online music concerts, enabling fans to connect and share their passions with one another and the artist. CBN created a dedicated chat room space on its desktop platform, allowing users to send questions, comments, and prayers during their daily shows.

Influencer Chats: Connecting Fans with Their Favorites

With the Influencer Chat widget, your users can witness live conversations with influential members of the community and even ask them questions directly. By creating the opportunity for these interactions, you’ll provide your users with a sense of proximity, personalization, and connection to their favorite athletes, musicians, and more.

The Influencer Chat can facilitate up to 10 influencers to chat while others are invited to watch, react, interact with widgets, and submit their questions.

Influencer Chat Use Case:

• 2021 WNBA Draft: LiveLike created The WNBA Draft Fan Zone, an interactive fan engagement platform. By leveraging our Influencer Chat feature, they brought together the commissioner of the league, athletes, and other influencers, creating a safe place for light interaction before, after, and during games that generated great audience engagement.

Advanced Chat Possibilities

Our platform offers a wide range of advanced functionalities to foster engaging conversations, whether you are leveraging Public, Private, or Influencer chats on your platform. These include:

• In-App Notifications and Alerts: Instant notifications and message alerts ensure users stay updated with the latest information, developments, promotions, and more. This allows brands to replicate a one-to-many broadcast experience, removing the need for users to rely on third-party platforms to stay updated.
• User Avatars: Personalized avatars add individuality to fan interactions, allowing users to express themselves and forge deeper connections within the community.
• Custom or Built-In Stickers: Stickers inject fun and personality into conversations, enabling users to convey emotions in a lively and expressive manner. Custom stickers also offer opportunities for branded visuals unique to your organization.
• Reactions: Reaction emojis provide a quick way for users to express their feelings, fostering camaraderie within the community.
• Multimedia Elements: Integration of images, videos, and GIFs enriches conversations, making them dynamic and engaging.

Moderation Capabilities

Our live chat solution features robust manual moderation capabilities, empowering moderators to delete messages, mute users, and remove individuals from certain chat rooms when necessary.

Users can also report messages themselves for review by appointed moderators. We also offer automatic moderation, where chat messages are filtered based on predefined criteria (e.g., keywords or objectionable content).

By combining manual and automatic moderation, our platform enables hosts to effectively manage chat interactions, uphold community guidelines, and create a welcoming environment for participants.

Why We Introduced Live Chats

LiveLike offers its three live chat applications to recreate the communal sports viewing experience for those watching from home. We believe sports should not only be watched but experienced together as a community, and a major aspect of that is being able to converse with other fans to share in the excitement of the wins, losses, and rivalries.

These live chats bring fans closer to the action, enabling them to share their celebrations, insights, and support with like-minded enthusiasts from around the globe.

In the digital age, sports fandom is no longer confined to the stands. LiveLike’s in-game chat feature brings the excitement, passion, and sense of belonging of a live stadium directly to fans’ screens and opens possibilities for connection.

Whether it’s a heated discussion during a game-winning play or connecting with favorite sports personalities, LiveLike’s chat features enhance the viewing experience like never before.

With LiveLike, the game isn’t just on the field—it’s in your hands, ready to be shared and celebrated with a global community of fans.

Get in touch to hear more about Live Chats or to learn how LiveLike can enhance your platform experience.