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This study aims to understand the impact of content orientation, media type, and information richness on fan engagement in multi-sport global events.

The authors conducted a content analysis on Twitter posts recording over two million user impressions from the official account managed by the International Olympic Committee for India during the Tokyo Olympic Games 2020. A multivariate Poisson model using the Bayesian approach was used for analyzing data.

This study found that fan engagement is likely to be higher for player-oriented content as opposed to team-oriented content. Also, the usage of photos to enhance engagement worked better than any other media type. Finally, the results revealed that the inclusion of hashtags has a positive effect on fan engagement for tweet comments but not for like count and retweet count.

The study highlights the differences in player versus team-oriented posts in global multi-sport competitions. The findings have significant implications for practicing sport managers by informing them about key elements that drive fans to engage in online communication.

This phenomenological study aims to explore how media promote and should promote wheelchair rugby.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 athletes at National Wheelchair Rugby Championship. In using a reflective thematical analysis approach, three themes were identified – media coverage: the promise of an unknown quantity; the battle of inspiration and athleticism; and leverage marketing and promote the “wow”.

Lacking fair representation from media resulting in the perception and reception gap between the general public and spectators was identified and explained by most of the athletes. Besides urging increased coverage with a shifting focus on athleticism, the important role of marketing was highlighted.

In short, the “wow” factor of the sport is its aggressiveness which can be its bestselling feature and used by stakeholders for maximum impact when marketing wheelchair rugby.

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 paper is to examine the relationship between growth in social media engagement, as defined by annual percentage increase in Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers, of US college athletics departments and outcome metrics of attendance and ticket revenue.

Regression models were developed to determine the amount of variance in dependent variables (attendance and ticket revenue) could be explained by several independent variables, including team success, team history, conference affiliation, Facebook Likes, and Twitter Followers. Four years of data were collected for each variable.

The regression models predicted between 53 and 88 percent of the variance among dependent variables. Social media measures, however, were not statistically significant predictors of attendance or ticket revenue.

The number of Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers were used as a proxy measure of social media engagement. While growth in Likes and Followers are a popular and convenient gauge of social media engagement, they represent a single measure of a multi-faceted construct. Also, data were limited to public university athletics departments, which are required to disclose annual ticket revenue. Findings may not be generalizable to other sport organizations.

The findings suggest growing social media interactions may not necessarily achieve marketing objectives related to increasing attendance or ticket revenue.

While numerous studies have examined the impact of social media on sport organizations, no prior studies have attempted to draw empirical connections between social media marketing efforts and revenue measures within sport organizations. This study represents the first to begin to examine this relationship.

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.

This study aims to examine how sport fans' intention to donate to college athletics differs by the type of communication and by the interactivity of communication when a college athletic department uses a social cause for marketing.

To discover differences in donation intention, the study adopts a two (social media/newspaper) by two (interactive/non-interactive) factorial experiment in which the study's created scenario is randomly presented to subjects. Participating in the online survey are 184 collegiate sport fans at a university in the American Midwest. Collected data are analyzed on the analysis of variance.

Results show that fans demonstrating the highest donation intention are those in the group of fan-interactive marketing on social media. Those showing the lowest are in the group of non-interactive marketing on newspaper. Between marketing interactivity and marketing platform, no interaction effect is found.

The study tests the effectiveness of marketing communication in the context of collegiate sports and identifies the impact of social media on college sport fans' donation intention. For collegiate athletic administrators designing a cause-related marketing campaign, this study provides practical information on how to use social media in delivering fan-oriented activities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Olympic audiences utilized Twitter to follow American National Governing Bodies (NGBs) during the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.

Guided by economic demand theory, the researchers sought to explore whether factors such as the content of social media messages, athlete’s performance, event presentation, scheduling, and TV broadcasting contribute to enhancing fans’ interests in following NGBs on Twitter during the Olympic Games. In total, 33 American NGB Twitter accounts formed the data set for this study. Each of NGBs’ Twitter data was collected every night at midnight from August 7 to 23, 2016. Data collected from each NGB account included number of followers, number of accounts followed, number of tweets, and number of “likes.”

Results of this study revealed that team’s performance and the number of tweets had direct and positive relationships with increasing the number of NGB’s Twitter followers on each competition day. The number of “likes,” however, had a significant negative relationship with fans’ interests in following NGBs’ Twitter.

The results of the study are expected to help Governing Bodies in the Olympic sports have a better understanding of fans’ social media usage.

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.

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the players' contribution and economic value in the soccer industry. Media visibility records provide us with comparable metrics to identify talent and make hiring decisions – these records can jointly capture sport (on-field) skills and other attractive (off-field) abilities.

This paper presents a valuation method that applies media visibility appraisals to estimate “theoretical values” of the transfer fees paid for hiring soccer players. The estimations are performed by analysing the evolution over time of the media exposure of about 5,000 individuals of more than 200 clubs.

The study’s empirical results reveal that, along with sport performance, the players' media status also affects their economic valuation, which explains why the clubs – in search of greater economic returns – fiercely compete for the most popular players. The paper also identifies the main factors determining the players' economic value. In predicting the players' transfer fees, some variables are statistically significant: individual media visibility, media visibility share of the player within his team, contract duration, status of the hiring team, years of experience, player's age at the end of the contract and the domestic league of the hiring team.

Professional sports provide reliable measures on individuals' performance that may help in the hiring process of workers. This paper identifies gifted soccer players while taking into account their skills as media leaders and the economic implications. Insofar as players' talents determine their teams' sport and economic achievements, the transfer fees paid for players must then be seen as a crucial factor. Measuring individual talent and being able to translate this talent into productivity levels entail serious methodological and empirical challenges.

Although literature exists that profiles the effects of technology on sport, there has been little exploration into the specific effects of media technologies. This case study contributes to the existing literature on the convergence of technology and sport by examining which of five key media technologies will have the greatest impact upon the televised ice hockey product. The results demonstrate the importance of forecasting media technology in sport.