It’s time for our March product update! We have exciting new developments to report, including the launch of two new community-driven features: social graph-as-a-service and user presence-as-a-service!
Social Graph-as-a-Service (SGaaS)
Social Graph-as-a-service (SGaaS) is an API-first service that enables LiveLike clients to let their users connect directly within their platform. With this powerful new feature, clients can enhance their user engagement and retention rates by allowing users to add friends and/or follow other users and connect with each other on the platform, a proven strategy for boosting audience engagement.
Thanks to the social graph feature, our clients can:
Hyper-personalize the user experience by letting users create their own network;
Encourage social interactions and reinforce users’ sense of belonging on the platform;
Retrieve critical first and zero-party data and gain a deeper understanding of their users;
Integrate social graph capabilities with existing LiveLike features and user data
How Does It Work?
At its core, a social graph is a diagram that represents relationships between individuals within a social network, like Facebook or LinkedIn, or any other online platform community. SGaaS works by allowing developers to access and analyze the social graph data through an API.
The API provides a set of endpoints that can be used to retrieve different types of information about a user’s social graph, such as their friends, followers, posts, and interactions. Developers can then use the API to analyze the data and generate insights or personalize the end-user experiences by integrating data-driven social features into their applications.
One of the key benefits of SGaas is that it saves developers the time and resources required to build and maintain their own social graph infrastructure. Instead, they can leverage the platform’s infrastructure and focus on building innovative applications that use social data.
The Benefits of Social-Graph-as-a-Service
SGaaS is a must–have for your users as it can significantly impact their online experience and meet these new user expectations for community-based platforms. It can help your users discover new connections and expand their social networks, increasing engagement and loyalty to your brand and platform.
Improving fan engagement and retention can be highly beneficial for your business, as it can lead to a significant increase in overall revenue. By providing developers with a powerful tool for accessing social graph data and creating hyper-personalized experiences, you will likely attract a greater amount of users, leading to increased user adoption and usage, as well as higher revenue from advertising and other monetization strategies.
Moreover, by providing a secure and standardized way for developers to access social graph data, SGaaS can help you build trust with your users and improve your reputation as a responsible platform. This can result in increased user loyalty and positive word-of-mouth, which can drive user acquisition and retention even further.
How to Use Social Graph For Your Business
There are many potential use cases for social graph-as-a-service, such as:
Making Personalized Recommendations: SGaaS can be used to analyze a user’s social graph data to provide personalized recommendations for content, products, or services. For example, a music streaming app could use SGaaS to suggest new artists or songs based on a user’s social connections and listening history.
Analyzing Social Networks: SGaaS can be used to analyze social connections between users to identify influencers, communities, and trends. For example, a marketing company could use SGaaS to identify key influencers in a particular industry or social network and target them with personalized marketing campaigns.
Detecting Fraudulent Behavior: SGaaS can be used to detect and prevent fraudulent activities by analyzing social connections and behavior patterns. For example, a financial institution could use SGaaS to identify fraudulent transactions by analyzing social connections between account holders.
Matching Jobs to Potential Employees: SGaaS can be used to match job seekers with potential employers based on social connections and skills. For example, a job search platform could use SGaaS to suggest job openings to users based on their social connections.
Moderating User-Generated Content: SGaaS can be used to identify and remove inappropriate or harmful content by analyzing social connections. For example, a social media platform could use SGaaS to detect and remove hate speech or cyberbullying based on social connections between users.
Overall, SGaaS can be a powerful tool for building more personalized and engaging social applications, improving privacy and security, and helping users discover new connections and opportunities.
The Social Graph service can also be integrated with other LiveLike functionalities, including chat rooms to enable users to locate the rooms their friends are in, widgets to allow users to compare their quiz results with their friends or followers, leaderboards to filter ranks based on “friends only,” and more.
Along with Social Graphs, we’ve launched another community-building service: User Presence-as-a-Service or UPaaS. UPaaS is a cloud-based service that provides real-time information about a user’s online or mobile device presence to other applications, services, or users. UPaaS enables developers to build applications and services that can detect and respond to a user’s presence in real-time, allowing for more personalized and contextual experiences.
Thanks to the user presence feature, our clients can:
Monitor real-time user activity on their website or application
Track user engagement and behavior patterns
Identify areas for improvement and optimization
Improve customer satisfaction and retention rates
Make data-driven decisions based on user insights
Enhance their overall user experience and user interface design
How Does It Work?
User presence as a service is a tool that allows businesses to monitor the activity of individual users on their website or application in real time. This service uses tracking technologies, such as cookies or browser fingerprinting, to identify and track users as they interact with the site or app.
The data collected through user tracking is then used to create real-time reports and dashboards that show how many users are active on the site or app, what they are doing, and how long they are staying on the platform. This information provides businesses with insights into user behavior patterns, such as which pages or features are most popular, which ones are causing users to drop off, and which ones are leading to conversions.
UPaaS typically works by integrating with a user’s device, application, or browser to detect their presence and status, such as whether they are online, offline, idle, or busy. This information is then transmitted to other applications or services via an API, enabling them to respond to the user’s presence and provide a more relevant and engaging user journey.
By using this service, platform owners allow their users to:
Determine status data to send more effective and targeted communications to users, including when they are online, offline, joining or leaving a channel, and subscribing or unsubscribing to a channel
Collect critical information on the platform sections or experiences your users are engaging with
List out which users are present in a given section of your experience
Update custom User Presence status data like matchmaking IDs, lobby names, heart rates, etc.
The Benefits of User Presence-as-a-Service
User presence as a service is a must-have tool for end-users as it provides businesses with valuable insights into how users are interacting with their website or application. By monitoring user activity in real time, businesses can gain a better understanding of how users are using their site or app, which can help them optimize their user experience and engagement strategies.
One of the key benefits of user presence services is that they can improve the overall user experience. By providing businesses with insights into user behavior patterns, user presence services can help them identify areas for improvement and optimization. This information can be used to make the site or app more intuitive and easier to navigate, ultimately leading to higher user satisfaction and retention rates.
User presence services can also help businesses resolve issues more quickly. By identifying issues and errors in real time, businesses can reduce downtime and improve user satisfaction. Additionally, user presence services can help businesses personalize their engagement strategies by tracking user behavior and providing targeted marketing campaigns or personalized recommendations.
Another important benefit of user presence services is increased security. By tracking user behavior, user presence services can help businesses identify and prevent fraudulent activity, such as account takeovers or other forms of cybercrime.
How to Utilize User Presence For Your Business
There are many potential use cases for User Presence-as-a-Service. Some examples include:
Messaging Apps: A messaging app can use User Presence to display the online or offline status of a user’s contacts. This can be useful for users who want to know if someone is available to chat before sending a message. Additionally, the app can provide feedback to users when they attempt to message an offline contact. This can help to prevent frustration and ensure that messages are sent to users who are more likely to see them.
Fitness Apps: A fitness app can leverage User Presence to show which classmates and friends are online and available for virtual workouts or to share their fitness progress. This can help users connect with each other quickly to find exercise buddies and provide motivation for staying active. Additionally, the app can display which fitness classes their online friends are currently in, allowing users to join in if they are interested or simply be motivated by their friends’ progress.
Gaming Apps: In a gaming app, User Presence can be used to indicate which friends are currently online and available to play games and connect with. Additionally, User Presence can show the game that an online friend is currently playing on their profile so that other friends can discover new games with them or quickly join in. User Presence can also enable users to find and join game lobbies where their friends are waiting, providing a more social gaming experience and increasing their engagement with the app.
Like our Social Graph feature, this capability can also be integrated with other LiveLike functionalities, such as chat rooms and leaderboards, allowing users to see who is available to chat or offering quests to reward users who log in multiple times. User Presence can be combined with:
Social Graphs: Apart from viewing a list of the friends they follow, users can also see their online or offline status and what they’re doing within the platform.
Chat Rooms: Users can view the list of users currently present in a chatroom.
Loyalty Features: Users can earn rewards based on their online activity and participation in specific areas of your platform.
Allowing users to see when their friends are online and what they are doing on the platform can enhance their sense of connection and in-app social engagement. It enables them to initiate conversations and engage with their friends in real time, fostering a sense of community and enhancing their overall user experience. As well, linking User Presence to rewards encourages users to return to your platform more frequently and for longer periods of time.
By integrating User Presence and Social Graphs into your platform, you can provide a similar interactive and social experience to social media platforms, catering to modern users’ strong desire for connection and community online. User Presence enables real-time communication and collaboration, while Social Graphs enable users to connect based on their shared interests and preferences. These features offer a personalized and social experience for your audience while also providing valuable user data to optimize your platform’s content and target effective advertising and marketing efforts. This approach can help you retain your users and reduce the risk of losing them to social media platforms, giving you a competitive advantage in the evolving digital era.
We hope you enjoy these new updates, and please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. If you are not yet using LiveLike but are interested in integrating our solution, you can also reach out and book a demo with our sales team.
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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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