Twitter: More women’s sports on your timeline

The GIST: Twitter’s not just busy with a takeover these days — it’s also in business with women’s sports. The social media platform signed a series of new deals with brands including the WNBA and Fox Sports. Coming soon to your timeline? Exclusive content dedicated to the W and next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup.

The details: The social media giant will livestream 12 W games this season as part of its expanded, multiyear partnership with the league. Twitter will showcase highlights and features, as well as weekly W Twitter Spaces hosted by journalists Ari Chambers and Monica McNutt.

• Meanwhile, Fox Sports — the U.S. rightsholder of the World Cups — will produce live pregame shows, highlight packages and weekly audio content of both the 2023 women’s and 2022 men’s tourneys exclusively for Twitter.

• Equal coverage just makes sense. Per SponsorPulse,* over 75 million Americans engage with the women’s tourney, just 10% less than those who engage with the men’s event.

Zooming out: Twitter isn’t the most quantitatively valuable social platform — Elon Musk’s $44 billion valuation falls dramatically short of the estimated $604 billion value of Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But, Twitter makes up for it qualitatively as a global discourse leader, and is poised to capitalize on sports fans’ growing preference for smartphone content.

• The app is a particularly good match for women’s sports. The emergence of social media made women’s sports more accessible than ever before. The rest, as they say, is history (and content for this newsletter).

*P.S. SponsorPulse is a launching partner of The GIST Sports Biz.