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As the popularity of social media increases, sports brands must develop specific strategies to use them to enhance fan loyalty and build brand equity. The purpose of this paper is to explore how two social media platforms were utilised by the Grand Slam tennis events to achieve branding and relationship marketing goals.

A content analytic design was employed to examine Twitter and Facebook posts from the official accounts during, and post-, each respective event.

Both sites were utilised to cultivate long-term relationships with fans and develop brand loyalty, rather than to undertake short-term marketing activations. However, these sites appear to serve a different purpose, and therefore unique strategies are required to leverage opportunities afforded by each. Interestingly, brand associations were utilised more frequently during the post-event time period.

This study offers practitioners with useful insight on branding and relationship-building strategies across two social platforms. These results suggest that strategies appear dependent on the event, timeframe and specific platform. Moreover, the events’ differences in post use and focus may also indicate some differences related to event branding in an international context. Furthermore, sport organisations should look to leverage creative strategies to overcome limitations that platform-specific functionality may impose.

This study offers unique insights brand-building efforts in an international event setting, which differ in a range of contextual factors that impact on social media utilisation.

The purpose of this study was to develop an initial understanding of sport brand ambassador participants' experiences in sponsored user generated branding (UGB) programs to assist sport organizations in developing the most mutually beneficial brand ambassador programs possible.

Semi-structured interviews were held with six individuals who serve as brand ambassadors for various sport brands. Data were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis.

Participants were intrinsically motivated to serve in brand ambassador roles. Their experiences were impacted by whether their personal expectations were met, perceived relationship with the brand, perceived value to the brand, and perceived amount of work involved. They reported the best aspects of participation were a sense of community and free products and/or discounts. The most challenging aspects included not wanting to come across as a marketer, self-inflicted pressure to perform a certain way for the brand, pressure to purchase products, and lack of clear communication from the brand.

As this study was qualitative, the findings are unique to the participants and the brands they represent. Therefore, the findings may be used to guide other research and brands but are not generalizable.

Sport brands wishing to employ sponsored UGB strategies such as brand ambassador programs must set clear expectations for ambassadors, communicate regularly, and develop a sense of community with and among ambassadors.

This study contributes to the limited sport management research on sponsored UGB and offers theoretical and practical implications in the areas of sport marketing and branding.

The purpose of the chapter is to overview the sociological literature related to social media and digital technologies in sport, with particular attention to media representations, content production, and audience responses. The chapter examines how social media and digital technologies reproduce and challenge hegemonic representation strategies, while maintaining existing cultural norms in the industry. Further, the chapter evaluates how athletes and fans create digital communities to bring visibility to marginalized groups. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of digital media for social justice and advocacy.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature in sociology of sport, sport communication, and media studies to provide an assessment of the implications of social media and digital technologies for sport.

Scholarship on social media and digital technologies in sport has primarily focused on descriptive analyses. Sociological approaches provide a theoretical grounding for examining issues of power, inequality, and social justice in relation to media ideologies, production, and consumption.

The chapter identifies future areas of study, including a more robust engagement with theory and an expansion of methodological approaches.

The chapter provides an overview of the literature on social media and digital technologies in sport of nearly 80 scholarly publications. The chapter moves beyond focusing on patterns in content to consider how structures, journalistic practices, cultural norms, and audience interactions collectively shape ideologies about gender, race, sexuality, religion, and disability in the sport media industry.

The present study is an initial attempt to assess the impact of motivators and constraints on individual's intention for sport media consumption. The advancement of sport media consumption has been underlined by the academic literature during the past few years. In fact, one of the most conspicuous concerns that experts in the sport industry face nowadays is the fans' preference to stay home and watch sport events. The objective of this research is to determine the impact of motivations and constraints for individuals' sport media consumption intentions.

A quantitative method was used for the purpose of this study, and a sum of 1,704 fulfilled questionnaires were obtained and analyzed by means of SPSS and AMOS

According to the results, internal and external motivators such as attachment to team, achievement, social, drama, role model and promotion observed to have a considerable impact on participants' consumption intention. Moreover, results pointed out a significant impact of structural and intrapersonal constraints on consumption intention.

The aim of the present research was to analyze the link between the constraints of spectator purposes and actual media consumption. In addition, there is an examination of generation-based factors among the spectators within the scope of possible contrasting aspects, a variable which has not been examined in any previous studies until now.