Africa’s biggest social network Mxit has been appointed the official social network for Team SA at the London 2012 Summer Olympics.
The dedicated portal on the Mxit platform, olympics_sa, has since attracted over 200 000 supporters who have sent messages of support and congratulations to Team SA, according to the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC).
It is the first time that South Africa’s Olympic team has partnered with a social network for an Olympic event.
Sphiwe Mahlangu, Spokesman at Mxit, had this to say on the partnership, “We want to be sure that Team SA knows it has the nation behind them and our portal will make sure that they can get messages from their supporters back home.”
Mahlangu further said that the portal is dedicated to Team SA at the London Olympics 2012 and Mxit users can access the portal by going into Tradepost> Sport> Team SA to Olympics.
In this portal, the social network’s users can access results, daily, what events are next for Team SA, Athletes schedules, send support messages to the team, team news, general olympic news, some facts about the Olympics and behind the scenes look at Team SA.
Mxit is accessible to all South Africans and users do not need a smartphone to get this information as it is accessible on over 3,000 different mobile phones in South Africa, explained Mahlangu.
According to SASCOC, the decision to partner with Mxit as giving it the ability to provide the 10 million active users on the social network with regular daily updates on the team’s progress at the Olympic games.
Tubby Reddy, SASCOC’s Chief Executive Officer said: “In our drive to make sport accessible
to all and sundry this is yet another innovative way of getting the message across to sports mad
South Africans.”
“I’m sure this network will be an extremely invaluable tool in accessing sporting communication,” he concluded.
