Professional Team Sport and Twitter: Gratifications Sought and Obtained by Followers

Abstract

Without exception, all professional sport teams in North America use social media to communicate with fans. Sport communication professionals use Twitter as one of the strategic tools of engagement, yet there remains a lack of understanding about how users are motivated and gratified in their Twitter use. Drawing on a specific sample from the Twitter followers of the Canadian Football League, the researchers used semistructured in-depth interviews, content analysis, and an online survey to seek an understanding of what motivates and satisfies Twitter followers of professional sport teams, measured through the gratifications sought and the fulfillment of these motives through the perceived gratifications obtained. The results add to the sport communications literature by finding 4 primary gratifications sought by Twitter users: interaction, promotion, live game updates, and news. Professional sport teams can improve strategic fan engagement by better understanding how Twitter followers use and seek gratification in the social-media experience.

Examining social media adoption and change to the stakeholder communication paradigm in not-for-profit sport organizations

“…Mahan, 2011). In fact, Gibbs, O'Reilly, and Brunette (2014) revealed fans of sport organizations not only seek information from social media, but desire promotional and interactive content. Part of the rationale for this desire stems back to the passion and camaraderie social media provides to this stakeholder group (Stavros, Meng, Westberg, & Farelly, 2014).…”

“…Interview questions (see Appendix A) were devised based upon the characteristics of the sample noted in Table 1 and previous literature on social media in sport (e.g., Armstrong et al, 2016;Gibbs et al, 2014;Stavros et al, 2014), including those specific to NSOs and social media (e.g., Abeza & O'Reilly, 2014;Naraine & Parent, 2016;Thompson et al, 2014). The contextualist approach framework was also utilized in the development of the interview guide.…”

Explaining the Number of Social Media Fans for North American and European Professional Sports Clubs with Determinants of Their Financial Value

“…Twitter is a personal communication tool, news-distribution vehicle, and celebrity tracker all-in-one platform (Gibbs et al 2014). While Twitter messages ("tweets") are limited to 140 characters, Twitter is still able to influence news, opinion, search, and advertising through end-user innovation (Johnson and Yang 2009).…”

“…Twitter users have created user conventions including RT for retweet, @ for reply, and # for hashtag trend finding, which researchers can use to identify different Twitter functions (Java et al 2007;Kwak et al 2010). Twitter users have also created over 15,000 applications to improve use and function: tracking trends (e.g., Twitscoop, Tweetscan, Tpsy); integrating Twitter with files and images (e.g., Twitpic, Twitvid); providing Twitter account-analysis tools (e.g., Klout, Twitter Grader); iPhone-specific apps (e.g., Tweetdeck, Tweetlogix); and acting as utilities for sharing linked information (e.g., Bit.ly, miny url) (Gibbs et al 2014). Following this last type of application, Twitter began to shorten all links (URLs) posted in tweets in 2011.…”

“…In the literature, several articles deal with the relationship between Facebook and/or Twitter and professional sports teams, focusing mainly on three aspects: the reasons for Facebook and Twitter use by professional sports teams (García 2011;Hopkins 2013;Wang and Zhou 2015;Waters et al 2011;Watkins and Lewis 2014); fans' expectations when using Facebook and Twitter (Gibbs et al 2014;Stavros et al 2014); and the drivers of changes in the number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers (Hopkins 2013;Pérez 2013;Watanabe et al 2015) 1 . These articles show that Facebook and Twitter are important for fans and thus demonstrate their importance for the relationship marketing strategy adopted by professional sports teams.…”