College Student Athletes and Social Media: The Psychological Impacts of Twitter Use

Abstract

Twitter, the popular social-media platform, is a staple in intercollegiate athletics. Although it is often regarded merely as a pastime, Twitter boasts advantages and disadvantages to college student athletes and their programs. This is primarily due to the nature of interactions and exchanges that take place between student athletes and the general public, be they fans, critics, or somewhere in between. Using a semistructured protocol, the researchers conducted a 75-min focus-group interview with 7 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I student athletes to examine the psychological impacts of Twitter use. A modified version of consensual qualitative research was used for data analysis. Results indicated that student athletes were heavily influenced and affected by Twitter use across various domains in their lives. Participants reflected on both advantages (e.g., avenue for advocacy and moral support and promoting team cohesion) and disadvantages (e.g., receipt of critical tweets and detrimental performance implications) of using the microblogging platform, thereby corroborating extant literature and providing a more balanced perspective of Twitter’s resulting impact. The researchers explicated practical implications including improved social-media training and the development of best practices to support student athletes in their responsible use of Twitter. Further research is necessary to better understand the differences in experiences of student athletes competing in revenue-generating sports compared with those competing in non-revenue-generating sports.

Smartphones and Varsity Athletes: A Complicated Relationship

“…Specific feelings of being obligated to communicate with coaches and to positively represent the university online appear to be unique additional stressors for varsity athletes, which can be exacerbated by their constant connexion to smartphones. These findings are in line with literature highlighting varsity athletes' perceived obligation to maintain a curated image online (David et al, 2018 ; Sanderson, 2018 ; Park et al, 2020 ). The athletes in this study experienced unique, sport-specific FOMO based on the stress of missing essential information from coaches or information that could potentially impact their sport performance or success (e.g., starting lines, different race times).…”

“…These studies suggest that athletes' use of smartphones and/or social media at various stages prior to sport performance can disrupt concentration (Encel et al, 2017 ), inhibit decision-making (Fortes et al, 2019 ), induce mental fatigue (Greco et al, 2017 ; Fortes et al, 2019 ), and delay sleep (Jones et al, 2019 ), in some instances, leading to performance decrements (Greco et al, 2017 ; Fortes et al, 2019 ; Jones et al, 2019 ). A distinct, but related stream of research has focused on competitive athletes' self-presentation and sharing behaviours on social media (e.g., Smith and Sanderson, 2015 ; Nankervis et al, 2018 ), as well as experiences and implications of using various platforms, particularly Twitter (David et al, 2018 ; Sanderson, 2018 ; Park et al, 2020 ). Ever-evolving social media usage continues to introduce new complexities to the varsity sport context, as these platforms provide athletes with great autonomy for identity management, communication, and public sharing.…”

Social Media as a Personal Branding Tool: A Qualitative Study of Student-Athletes’ Perceptions and Behaviors

“…Research on social media policies from NCAA institutions indicate that the majority of intercollegiate athletics exclusively focus on preventing student-athletes from misusing social media, which renders their social media education and policies as more restrictive and regulatory (Sanderson, 2011;Sanderson, Browning, & Schmittel, 2015;Sanderson, Snyder, Hull, & Gramlich, 2015). Other research has examined student-athletes' perspectives on their social media use, mostly Twitter, but their main focuses were not on the benefits of social media use but various other aspects, including how to respond to critical tweets (Browning & Sanderson, 2012;David et al, 2018), perceptions of social media training (Sanderson et al, 2015), and messages from athletic departments regarding their tweets (Sanderson & Browning, 2013). While the benefits of social media use often are under-appreciated compared to the negative impacts (Sanderson, Snyder, et al, 2015), it still is worthwhile for student-athletes not to blindside positive functions of social media and instead take full advantage of them, including personal branding.…”

“…Their findings focused primarily on what student-athletes showed on their social media pages, and thus called for further investigation on student-athletes' logic on their use of social media and how they strategically utilize social media platforms. While a few studies discussed the importance of student-athletes' use of social media for building personal brands (Browning & Sanderson, 2012;David et al, 2018), they did not delve into how student-athletes perceive social media use for personal branding purposes and in what ways they utilize social media platforms to present themselves.…”

Climb ups or thumbs ups?

“…Focusing likewise on informal settings Setzer, Ernst, and Miethling (2014) identified the need to belong to the community and to gain recognition for one's performance as major drivers for using Facebook among windsurfers. Summing up research on using social media in general sports-related (not particularly informal) contexts four dimensions of gratifications occur: social gratifications (e.g., interaction, showing unity and fellowship, support), information (e.g., information-seeking, advice, knowledge), entertainment (passing time), and selfstaging (David et al, 2018;Braumüller & Hartmann-Tews, 2017;Kim, Kim, & Choi, 2016;O'Reilly, Berger, Hernandez, Parent, & Seguin, 2012).…”