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Social media enables sport organizations to connect with customers in a dynamic, ubiquitous, and timely manner. Although these organizations routinely use social media, the best practices to improve customer engagement remain elusive. This paper aims to examine National Football League (NFL) teams’ Instagram posts to understand how sport teams can utilize social media to drive customer engagement.

Guided by uses and gratification theory, the author employs a machine learning algorithm to assess the content of NFL teams’ posts from the 2013–2014 season to the 2017–2018 season. The author performs regression analyses to investigate how post topic, together with confounding factors, boost customer engagement.

Results highlight the importance of informational content in eliciting engagement and reveal distinctions in topics deemed “social content” in the literature. The author further identifies variations in how post topics engage sport fans and general customers.

Results provide implications for sport organizations to craft social media content for customer engagement.

The ubiquity of social media provides sport organizations with opportunities to communicate with fans and as a result, potentially strengthen team identification. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to emerging research on the nature of social media use by sport organizations by examining the platforms adopted over a three-year period by National Basketball Association (NBA) teams and the way in which social media is used to communicate and engage with fans.

A content analysis was used to examine online comments posted by all 30 teams in the NBA on Facebook and Twitter during the off-season.

The results demonstrate that NBA teams have embraced social media, primarily using four different types of communication to engage fans: Informing, Marketing, Personalizing and Activating.

The authors establish that social media is an effective vehicle for sport organizations to engage with fans and to enhance team identification. The data suggests that teams should make a concerted effort in their communications, where possible, to personalize communications, genuinely inform and involve fans and provide relevant marketing communications, all of which can be effectively implemented within existing marketing efforts.

This is the first study to examine the direct use of social media by sport organizations and its potential for enhancing team identification.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the contribution of social media teams to firm social media performance. Although social media teams are tasked with planning, executing and optimizing the social media marketing effort of firms, little systematic research has examined their roles. Drawing on social cognitive theory, the present study develops collective social media efficacy as a key mechanism to explain the contribution of social media teams to firm social media performance.

The study tested a conceptual framework in which social media team members' previous experience, short-term training and online resources use contribute to collective social media efficacy. In turn, collective social media efficacy is hypothesized to enhance firm social media performance. The study employed primary data and PROCESS macro to test its proposed hypotheses.

The findings revealed that previous social media experience, short-term training and online resources use contributed to firm social media performance by enabling social media teams to build strong collective social media efficacy.

The findings offer novel insights into how firms can optimize their social media marketing effort by systematically managing their social media teams. The findings add to the nascent literature on the organizational influences of social media performance.

This article explores how the social media usage affect team creative performance via transactive memory system, knowledge interaction and expertise coordination.

The study is based on the perspective of transaction memory system and expertise coordination theory. A research model was constructed and tested, involving 289 individuals from 67 distributed agile software development teams.

The results indicate that social media usage is positively correlated with transactive memory system, and social media usage and transactive memory system have positive relations to knowledge interaction and expertise coordination. Moreover, this analysis shows that knowledge interaction has a positive relationship with expertise coordination, and expertise coordination positively affects team creative performance. However, knowledge interaction has no direct relationship on team creative performance, and its indirect impact on team creative performance was fully mediated by expertise coordination. This research shows that social media usage by distributed agile software development teams can support the development of transactive memory system and promote expertise coordination. In addition, knowledge interaction alone is not enough, and expertise coordination must be achieved to increase team creative performance.

First, this paper explores the mechanism of transactive memory system in distributed Agile Software Development teams from the perspective of social media, which is different from the previous information processing theory framework that confined transactive memory system to the cognitive aspects of knowledge coding, storage and retrieval. Second, this research focuses on the knowledge interaction and expertise coordination formed by team members in the process of communication in the context of social media usage, which confirms the crucial roles of social media usage and transactive memory system in team knowledge management and team creative performance. Then, this research also shows that the development of transactive memory system in the team is indeed an important factor to promote knowledge interaction and professional expertise coordination.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of mobile social media functions on explicit and implicit knowledge sharing under the “Guanxi” system based on the framework of stimulus–organism–response (SOR).

Combined with Guanxi theory, this paper designs an experiment to collect data from the new product development (NPD) teams.

Interestingly, the results show that the effect of social media communication function on employees is greater than the impact of collaboration on employees. Specifically, on the one hand, the more employees communicate in social media, the better their feelings will be, the less they will share knowledge. On the other hand, the collaboration function has a significantly negative impact on the psychological factors of employees. Excessively close cooperation and contact may instead create a contradiction between the employees, which is not conducive to the occurrence of knowledge sharing.

This paper extends SOR framework by combining Guanxi theory to examine the relationship between social media functions and knowledge sharing behavior (KSB). In practical, companies should pay attention to the frequency of employee using social media when it is introduced for NPD teams to control the negative influence of social media functions on employee KSB.

Research in sport has examined the use of social media by organizations and athletes, but little research has assessed the effectiveness of social media marketing, especially in terms of relationship-building. When relationship marketing is used as a framework for using social media, it should also be used to guide assessment. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine a model for measuring the impact of fans’ Facebook interactions with their favorite sport team on relationship quality, purchase intentions and referral intentions.

After conducting a survey of professional sport fans through Amazon Mechanical Turk, data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The total sample size was 425.

Results indicated the more a fan interacts with their favorite team on Facebook, the higher their relationship quality and intentions to purchase. There was no significant effect on referral intentions. Additionally, the indirect effect of Facebook interaction on purchase intention as mediated by relationship quality was positive and significant.

Based on results, it appears that relationship marketing can be used as a framework for assessing social media marketing effectiveness in sport, and that as suggested by relationship marketing theory, social media interaction does improve relationships between fans and teams. Researchers should continue to explore this model and include other variables, such as team identification, to gain a thorough understanding of social media marketing effectiveness.

Sport marketers should focus strategy on Facebook on building relationships through content that encourages interactions between the team and fans.

While research in sport has suggested social media be used to build relationships, little research measuring whether it actually does so exists. This study extends social media research in sport by modeling and testing the relationships between social media interaction, relationship quality and consumer behavioral intentions.

This chapter covers many angles of the role national identity plays in the production, consumption, and reception of sport via social media channels. More specifically, it explores what sociology specifically brings to the equation regarding theories of group identity, identifies the core studies that represent what we currently know about national identification in the social mediated sports world, and determines fruitful themes and paths for subsequent investigation.

The approach to the chapter largely involves the synthesis of a diverse set of literatures in the academic spaces of nationalism, fan behavior, and social media.

The chapter advances the argument that only a handful of investigations in social media content focus on how national identity is forged within sport. Global events (Olympics, World Cup) seem to be the current areas of investigation, with social media facilitating various forms of BIRGing and CORFing depending largely on real-time results.

Relevant and understudied areas for future investigation on the nexus of sport, social media, and national identity include gendered correlates, GORFing (Glory Out of Reflected Failure), redefinitions of sport fandom, eSports, and the application of new technologies, applications and platforms in the social media space.

The chapter establishes a foundation of knowledge triangulating sport, social media, and national identity while creating warrants for key scholarly agenda advancement in the future.

This study aims to explore how team task-related social media usage (TSMU) and social-related social media usage (SSMU) affect employees' perceptions of intra-team cooperation and competition and further individual creativity.

This study conducted a questionnaire survey on enterprises in China that have implemented social media and obtained 348 useable questionnaires from 55 work teams.

The results revealed that employees' perceptions of intra-team cooperation and competition can promote employees' creativity. Employees' cooperation perception can be significantly positively affected by TSMU and SSMU, whereas employees' competition perception can be significantly positively affected by TSMU. Regarding congruence, the results indicated that the more balanced between TSMU and SSMU, the stronger the competition perception.

Managers should pay critical attention to the role of team social media usage (SMU) in shaping employees' perceptions of their team environments. They should realize the different outcomes and the joint effects of the different types of SMU.

This study contributes to the social media literature by explaining the impact of team SMU on employees' perceptions and evaluations of team environments based on the social information processing theory. The study presents the relationships among team SMU, employees' perceptions of cooperation and competition and employee creativity. Moreover, this study expands research on the trade-off of SMU by exploring the impact of balanced and imbalanced SMU in a work team.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of social media strategies of sport organizations when an unexpected absence of relevant content occurs. The study explored the typologies of Instagram posts of NHL teams and measured engagement of social media content that was not planned in advance.

A mixed methods approach was utilized through a content analysis of 12 NHL team social media feeds. 502 (n = 502) posts were examined from the period of March 12 – May 26 during which the NHL season was suddenly paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Typologies of posts were identified through a qualitative coding process and ANOVA tests were conducted to examine the effectiveness of each typology in engaging consumers.

This study found that social media strategies of the sampled NHL teams is evidence of disinnovation with digital, as opposed to the previously conceptualized innovative properties that these activities bear. Therefore, in order to achieve the consumer engagement outcomes sought to build stronger relationships with fans and deliver on the expected leveraging capabilities for sponsors, sport marketers must reconsider their current, imbalanced approach and whether the more inherently interactive content should be balanced with entertaining content that requires organic consumer engagement.

This study offers a unique application of UGT, highlighting that social media in a sport context is not just about gratifying consumers, but preventing diminishing engagement and exploitation of users through overuse of sponsorship-laced content.