If you are one of the nearly 2.5 million people that “Like” the NBA on Facebook, then you have probably seen a version of NBAStore.com living on the Facebook site. I can only imagine how well this has done so far. On Facebook, the NBA encourages daily fan participation by creating polls on Fan Appz and posting pictures and videos nearly every day. There are usually over 1,000 comments per post and this is why the NBA is the most “Liked” sports league that uses social media.

For the Finals, though, the NBA has taken it one step further.

According to Melissa Brenner, NBA Vice President of Marketing, “Expanding our role in social media increases the ways our fans can interact and experience The Finals and is the perfect complement to our comprehensive coverage on NBA.com. Our fans are active on multiple social media networks and we want to continue to communicate with them directly and provide them with NBA content in their favorite spaces.”

In March, we covered the Knicks’ first ever TweetUp event, which featured a great panel that discussed the growing interaction between social media followed by a Knicks game where fans tweeted using a special hashtag. If your team has not held one of these events yet, they certainly will soon, as the relationship between social media and sports continues to grow. During this year’s Finals, the NBA will conduct its own TweetUp event for fans in Boston and Los Angeles that will feature appearances by NBA legends.

For the Finals, the NBA is working with the increasingly popular location-based social networking platform, Foursquare, that will allow fans to check in from where they are watching the games. Fans in attendance will also receive special badges by “shouting” about the Lakers or Celtics. In addition to that, NBA players will be interacting with fans through SayNow, a social networking platform that allows fans to interact via voice messaging.

We have also been trying to keep up with the inevitable, so make sure to follow DimeMag on Twitter and Facebook for posts, updates and other original content.

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