Fame data: The growth of the athletes' official social media profiles in Rio 2016

Abstract

The growing use of social networks in Brazil has opened new channels of communication between athletes and fans, sustaining a dialogue in parallel to competition venues and traditional media. This text seeks to identify ways in which the number of followers in the official profiles of Brazilian Olympic athletes in the social networks Facebook, Twitter and Instagram was impacted by their results and their participation in the Rio 2016 Games. A methodology based on grounded theory was developed, consisting on a quantitative analysis of followers´ data evolution in social networks from a set of eight Olympic athletes, divided among gold, silver and bronze medalists, as well as non-winners. Among the verified data, it was possible to identify that the performance of the athletes in the last Olympic Games impacted on the growth of the number of followers in their social networks, with Instagram being the network that featured the biggest increase. Gold medalists had the highest growth rates, but the analysis also showed that one bronze medalist and another nonmedalist athlete had the highest number of followers, indicating that the podium did not leverage alone the online audience. The data made it possible to infer the presence of concepts such as the aesthetic beauty of sports images and the importance of mediatic exposure, besides allowing to deduce the existence of other influential factors in the growth of the Olympic athletes' networks.