Is Snapchat Making a Big Push into Sports?

The smartphone app Snapchat may seem like it should only appeal to over-sharing tweens and dirty little dirty birds, but the company’s higher-ups are hoping that they can gain further traction with sports, leagues and athletes (pause for Brett Favre jokes) with a recent hire.

According to TechCrunch, Snapchat has recently swooped in and stolen Nike’s global director of digital, Eric Toda. Toda brings experience in social media, licensing, and content syndication, among others. Snapchat is most likely hoping to leverage Toda’s skills into cultivating partnerships in the sports world — to help teams and leagues better engage with fans.

This is all possible with Snapchat’s Our Stories feature. Users have the ability to add snaps to their own individual accounts, allowing their friends to view a 24-hour collection of all they wished to share. Our Stories brings in a bigger sense of community, allowing users to add their content to an event-based story that anyone could see. The recent 2014 World Cup was one such event, and fans could post images and video to that stream from the stands in Brazil or their own living rooms.

If Snapchat can work deals with sports entities, the Our Stories feature could widen to include individual games, playoff rounds/tournaments, or just be a place for fans of a certain team to post all their team-related pictures and videos. Fans could post scenes from their seats at the NCAA basketball tournament, videos from the Super Bowl, or clips of them cheering for their team during Game 7 of the World Series for the whole world to see.

Though it’s easy to speculate, exactly what Toda’s roll at Snapchat will be remains to be seen. But Snapchat would be a modern and fairly unobtrusive way for teams to create and cultivate fan engagement. Snapchat has moved on from naughty pics into big time corporate involvement. Sports seems like a logical next step, and it appears to be one Snapchat is trying to take.

(Header photo via Maurizio Pesce)