Twitter Adds #NFL & Game Timelines To Its Football Game Plan

Taking a page from its very successful World Cup engagement playbook, Twitter is creating specialized timelines for fans of the National Football League.

The NFL season starts tonight — the Green Bay Packers play the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks — and Twitter wants to be the top online forum for fans to converse about pro football, by far the most popular sport in the United States.

From a Twitter blog post:

Starting tonight and throughout the entire season, whether you are at the stadium, at home, a sports bar or simply in transit, Twitter will deliver football fans a national tailgate party in real time.

Twitter’s football timelines — for each game and the NFL in general — are essentially hub pages that aggregate tweets by teams, players, coaches, press, fans and celebrities. It’s the same format that the company used during soccer’s World Cup earlier this summer. That event was a big success for Twitter, shattering the network’s records for activity, including 618,725 tweets per minute at the final whistle of German’s victory over Argentina in the final.

The NFL timelines are now active on Twitter.com and the iPhone app and will be coming soon to Android.

The stage is set… #Kickoff2014 #GBvsSEA pic.twitter.com/sB9cga2Z1w

— NFL (@nfl) September 4, 2014