Facebook introduced a new simple and free feature which enables sports clubs to allow their supporters to decorate their profile picture with a frame of their favorite team. Those types of features are becoming more popular after the latest terrorist attack in Paris when people all around the world put the French flag as a frame of their profile picture.
All you have to do is to click the „try it“ button next to the post of the club which states „Decorate your profile picture like this to support your team“, or follow this link. Then, you can select your frame from all of the clubs who signed up to use this new feature.
You can also take a selfie and put the frame on a new photo, or just select a previous photo. Furthermore, you can choose how long you wish to have a frame on your picture. You can choose from one day to one week option, customize it to a specific time and after the expiration time your picture will instantly return to a no-frame version, without spamming the news feed of your friends. Of course, there is also an option to leave the frame on your picture indefinitely, until you decide to take the frame off.
This new feature was presented in October 2015, when Facebook approached the Florida Gators, an American football team of the University of Florida. Fans loved that feature and thousands of them added the Gators logo to their profile picture which helped to spread the awareness about their team to the millions of Facebook’s users.
Currently, you can choose a frame with club’s logo from NBA, MLB, NCAA Football, English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, France Ligue 1, Campeonato Brasileirao, Turkish Super Lig, German Bundesliga and Davis Cup. All of the NBA clubs are offering a personalized frame for their fans just like 30 clubs from NCAA Football. There are eleven Premier League club’s which offer this feature to its fans and five from Bundesliga (Bayern München, Borussia Dortmund, Borussia Mönchengladbach, Köln and HSV), but only two clubs from La Liga (Barcelona and Real Madrid) and three from Serie A (AC Milan, Inter Milan and Juventus) and Ligue 1 (Marseille, Monaco and PSG).
Great way to show your identity and promote your team to the global audience
This FB feature is great because fans can show the passion for their favorite team and spread awareness about it around the world. People who are proud of their club are the best promoters of it because they will spread the club’s positive story wherever they go. By wearing the logo and colors of their favorite team supporters are spreading awareness and love for their club in their immediate, and with social networks, in the global environment.
I think that this FB feature is a superior option to just putting a clubs crest or colors on your profile picture. In this case, you are showing your identity by connecting your picture with clubs logo, and in, some way, you are making a deeper connection with your favorite club.
It is also a great because it allows any club’s fans to connect with each other easier, and make life-long friendships, through the same identification marks. Group affiliation is the strongest emotional background, and this kind of communication gives people the opportunity to show their identity to the rest of the world and simultaneously become a free and very efficient promotional tool for their favorite team.
Conclusion
Sports clubs can now use a new Facebook feature that allows fans all over the world to put their favourite club’s frame on their profile picture. It is known that a proud fan is the greatest promoter of a club, and with that option fans can show their identity and club’s logo to millions of Facebook users. But the problem is that not many clubs have used this option yet, probably because Facebook released it less than two months ago. So, it is very important that clubs have people who follow the latest trends in the sports marketing world who will introduce them with the latest information.
