LiveLike x SLT: Building Trust & Community With Fan Engagement Tools
LiveLike x SLT: Building Trust & Community With Fan Engagement Tools
LiveLike x SLT: Building Trust & Community With Fan Engagement Tools
When it comes to sports, the power of fandom can make or break an organization’s journey to success. After all, those passionate supporters who truly connect with a brand or platform are the ones who go the extra mile: engaging with content, championing initiatives, and becoming true brand advocates. But there are two secret ingredients that transform ordinary fans into die-hard enthusiasts, and that’s trust and community.
At LiveLike, we understand the power and importance of building a personal connection and establishing trust among users. In fact, our suite of engagement tools is specifically designed to create platforms founded on authenticity, community and connection. From Ask Me Anything (AMA) widgets to interactive polls and cheer meters, our tools empower audiences to use their voices and express their thoughts and opinions on a platform.
In other words, our commitment to putting fans first goes beyond just individual user engagement. We believe in the concept of dedicated fan zones and fan-controlled action, where supporters come together and can have a genuine impact on the direction and decisions of an organization.
And there’s one extraordinary partnership that truly showcases our dedication to building platforms that put fans first: LiveLike x Super League Triathlon (SLT).
Revolutionizing Audience Engagement: Fan-Controlled SLT Team Cheetahs
In 2022, SLT introduced an innovative concept to revolutionize the triathlon experience: they gave their fans the ability to become owners of a fan-controlled team called the SLT Cheetahs. Through this groundbreaking initiative, fans were given the opportunity to actively participate in the team’s management. Through the purchase of a membership, fans were invited to get involved in making crucial decisions for the team’s success, providing them with an unprecedented level of engagement.
LiveLike’s Role in the SLT Team Cheetahs Fan Team Experience
In line with this unique initiative, SLT partnered with LiveLike for the 2022 Championship Series, integrating our solution to launch a dynamic digital fan team experience.
Through weekly LiveLike polls, coupled with timely alerts, members were given the opportunity to actively participate in shaping the future of the Cheetahs team and were empowered to vote on critical decisions, provide input on team strategies, and even influence the selection of team athletes. This fan-controlled approach not only strengthened the bond between the organization and its supporters but also fostered a sense of ownership and pride among SLT fans.
Ever since its launch, this LiveLike-powered fan team experience has worked to heighten the excitement and captivation of SLT fans, while also highlighting SLT’s dedication to transparency and respect for their fans’ opinions and feedback.
Once connected to the platform, users can easily access the SLT dashboard, featuring various sections where they can vote on polls, influence pivotal choices such as draft picks and kit design, make tactical calls, and even engage in live Q&A sessions with top athletes.
Fans can also access current, future and past decisions, as well as those they can influence by upgrading their membership. In other words, depending on the membership package they have purchased, users can access polls of varying importance to the team. For example, the Standard Package allows fans to choose one female Team Cheetah athlete to be retained, while the Gold+ Package grants them the ability to select one athlete for an exclusive interview.
Thanks to our dynamic interactive toolkit, the SLT fan team experience works to set a new standard for audience engagement in the world of sports, one that better takes into account the power of building trust and community among passionate fans.
Building Trust On Your Platform With LiveLike Tools
Such as is the case with the SLT fan team experience, integrating LiveLike engagement tools into your platform can empower users to share their thoughts and opinions, giving them a voice in the conversation and creating a passionate fan community that is fully committed to your brand and its success.
Here are some of the key tools brands can implement with LiveLike to maintain trust through transparency and community building:
1. Ask Me Anything (AMAs): Host AMAs where fans can freely ask questions, provide feedback, and inquire about the company’s actions, decisions, and intentions. This open dialogue demonstrates a brand’s commitment to transparency and fosters a sense of community, building trust with the audience.
2. Polls: Use LiveLike’s polling feature to involve fans in key decision-making processes. By seeking their opinions, brands will not only make users feel valued and engaged but also demonstrate a commitment to meeting their needs.
3. Cheer Meters: Harness the power of cheer meters to enable fans to express their support and gauge audience sentiment in real time. This interactive tool promotes transparency by showcasing collective reactions and creating an inclusive environment where fans feel heard and valued.
4. Social Embeds: Maximize the impact of social embeds within the LiveLike suite to share comprehensive information and diverse perspectives seamlessly. By incorporating external sources, user-generated content, and real-time updates, you enhance transparency and authenticity, building trust with your fans. Social embeds allow you to feature genuine interactions and testimonials about your business, offering social proof, reinforcing the brand’s credibility and fostering trust among users.
5. Live Chats: Leverage our live chat functionality to facilitate real-time communication between fans and brand representatives. This direct interaction fosters brand transparency, as fans can receive immediate responses, seek clarification, and engage in open conversations, further strengthening trust and building a sense of community.
Building Trust & Community with LiveLike x Red Sox
Another great example of LiveLike’s trust and community-building tools in action is the case of LiveLike x Red Sox. For Big Papi’s Hall Of Fame Induction in 2022, MLB and Red Sox used the LiveLike audience engagement suite to provide Red Sox fans with a ceremony experience based on transparency and connection. The main objective was to encourage people to use the Red Sox digital platforms to watch the show together and build a sense of camaraderie among fans.
For this collaboration, MLB and Red Sox used our Influencer Chat, Interactive Timeline, Informative Widgets, and AMA widgets to build a sense of fan community on the platform and keep users engaged.
During the event, Red Sox fans were able to use the influencer chat as a way to participate in the action, with the ability to react to messages posted by the club in real time. They were also encouraged to share their thoughts with one another about the ceremony by contributing to polls, emoji sliders and trivia quizzes on the timeline mode.
All in all, getting users involved on your platform is essential for building trust and community with your fans, and LiveLike’s audience engagement tools can facilitate this process. By openly sharing information, giving them a space to share their voice and connect, and inviting them to join the conversation or even make key brand decisions, companies can create environments of openness that resonate with their fans.
SLT’s successful implementation of the LiveLike platform highlights the transformative potential of fan engagement tools in the sports world. By actively involving fans, these tools build trust, foster a sense of community, and create fan-focused experiences that go beyond the final score.
As the sports industry continues to evolve, it’s crucial for teams and organizations to embrace these innovative platforms and recognize the immense value they bring. By prioritizing fan engagement, sports entities can cultivate loyal communities, strengthen their brand, and elevate the entire sports experience to new heights.
Get in touch to learn more about the power of fan zones or to find out how LiveLike can enhance your platform experience.
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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