Most of the best professional athletes have sponsorship deals with sports apparel companies, some even have shoes named after them and others are spokespeople for large corporations.
But very few can say that they have their own social media platform—Golden State Warriors superstar Steph Curry is one of the rare athletes that have one.
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According to USA Today, Curry’s college roommate and fellow Davidson basketball teammate, Bryant Barr, noticed a difference in Curry’s social media presence as he exponentially grew in followers. When he asked, Curry felt that his Twitter account was merely too cluttered.
So, Barr brought on board designer Jason Mayden, both of whom had worked at Nike prior to this venture, and the two began work on Slyce with much of Curry’s input.
When you ask Steph to sing his favorite song on Slyce, he delivers. #teamslyce #puregold #onlyonslyce pic.twitter.com/3i0qPNlelS
— Slyce (@teamslyce) February 27, 2016
What they came up with is a platform of “influencers” and fans. The influencers are all pro athletes at the moment, the list consisting of Curry, Andre Ward, Brice Butler, Coby Fleener, Justin Forsett, Kent Bazemore, Malcolm Smith, Mike Conley and Torrey Smith. All of these are NFL players or NBA players, except for Ward, who is a professional boxer.
Essentially a fan follows any number of these influencers, and they get a consolidated feed of all of that athlete’s social media accounts—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Slyce. But the most revolutionary aspect of Slyce is the Q&A sessions that they hold, which solves exactly what athletes like Curry dislike about their social media accounts.
So, the idea behind the Q&A’s is that Slyce’s software will automatically filter questions that are pertinent to the influencer, and that the influencer would like to answer. At the moment, since Slyce just began last month, the filtering software is only working at about 10 percent automatic capacity, and the influencer manually sorts through the other 90 percent of questions.
But with time, Barr and Mayden’s hope is that each Q&A session will be automatically be curated for every athlete, saving them time and making communication with their fans easy and fun.
Check out the platform at https://www.slyce.io/.