Cricket South Africa (CSA) has launched its first mobile-only community, lovecricket, on mobile social network Mxit. 
The app gives fans match details, player profiles, match scores, news, polls and an opportunity to have their say.
“The success of our Facebook and Twitter profiles have proven to us that cricketing fans are keen to connect with the national team and stay in touch with the game, even if they can’t be in the stadium,” says Naasei Appiah, CSA acting-CEO.
“As a mobile app, lovecricket, expands on our social media success by giving more people the chance to become part of the conversation. Mxit’s natural inclusivity – because it works across feature and smart phones – made it the perfect platform for us to keep increasing awareness and growing our fan base.”
Mxit is a downloadable social chat application that works on over 3000 mobile devices from a standard Nokia to a high-end Samsung. Lovecricket is one of the first applications to be built using Mxit’s embedded drag-and-drop mobile app building tool, Mxit Launch, which is currently in beta.
CSA’s plans for the lovecricket community include up to the minute live scoring, sharing the comments from Mxit users on screens at the games, giving fans the chance to chat to players via Mxit and running competitions through the app.
Currently the app mirrors the scoring information in the Twitter feed. On match days the Twitter feed averages around 40 score focused tweets to keep fans updated on the match.
“The scoring functionality is an important part of this app. Getting background information on players or games is great but the real engagement and excitement will be built by giving fans the sense that they are right there at the stadium. Once the real time scoring is added I can’t imagine a better mobile way to stay close to a game,” says Vincent Maher, chief marketing officer of Mxit.