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"The NBA is expanding its social reach for the 2012 playoffs by launching official Pinterest and Tumblr accounts and inviting fans around the world to tweet photos of the baskets where they shoot hoops.  \n\"In the playoffs, everything gets heightened on and off the court, including fan interest,\" Melissa Rosenthal Brenner, the NBA\u2019s vice president of marketing, told Mashable. \"We want our social media feeds to follow suit.\"\nThe league is launching on two visual-based platforms to open up possibilities tough to pull off on its existing social accounts, according to Brenner.\n\"With Tumblr, we really admire the ease of photo sharing, and how photos are depicted on the platform,\" she says.\nThe NBA's Tumblr page will be primarily devoted to photos from recent pro basketball history \u2014 classic championship match-ups, seminal moments from great players, and so forth. The Tumblr concept rendering above features a shot of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley matching up in the 1994 NBA Finals. The NBA Tumblr is scheduled to launch Wednesday morning, with Pinterest coming later this week. \n\"We've been following Pinterest and what other brands are doing there for a while,\" Brenner says. \n\nSEE ALSO: Pinsanity: How Sports Teams Are Winning on Pinterest\nThe NBA's Pinterest profile will be primarily devoted to two strategies. The first: ecommerce, featuring throwback apparel tied to the NBA calendar, for example. The second: quirky characters, odd hairstyles and other moments and storylines that make the NBA so fun to follow beyond the basketball court. \nTumblr and Pinterest will add to the NBA's already robust social media presence. Counting league, team and player accounts, it now claims about 260 million combined Facebook likes and Twitter follows. \nFor the playoffs, the league plans to use its huge Twitter following to stage a community-driven promotion showcasing all the places fans play and watch basketball. Dubbing the stunt \"Hoops Around the World,\" fans will be encouraged to tweet photos of basketball goals near them to the @NBA account with hashtag #hoops. Throughout the playoffs, the NBA will retweet standout shots before compiling an interactive world map showcasing all the submissions in time for the finals. \nWhat do you think of the NBA's social media initiatives for the playoffs? Let us know in the comments. \nImage courtesy alexkess, Flickr."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/04/27/nba-playoffs-social-media/>