Understanding Professional Athletes’ Use of Twitter: A Content Analysis of Athlete Tweets

Abstract

The online social network Twitter has grown exponentially since 2008. The current study examined Twitter use among professional athletes who use Twitter to communicate with fans and other players. The study used content analysis to place 1,962 tweets by professional athletes into one of six categories: interactivity, diversion, information sharing, content, promotional, and fanship. Many of the tweets fell into the interactivity category (34%). Athletes used Twitter to converse directly with their followers. Those with the most followers had more interactivity tweets. A large percentage of tweets (28%) fell into the diversion category, because many of the tweets involved non-sports-related topics, and relatively few of the tweets (15%) involved players discussing their own teams or sports. In addition, only 5% of the tweets were promotional in nature, indicating that professional athletes may not be taking advantage of the promotional opportunities Twitter may provide.

How Do Sports Organizations Use Social Media to Build Relationships? A Content Analysis of NBA Clubs’ Twitter Use

“…Thus it can be applied to study social media used by organizations for strategic communication. This perspective has been applied to various new communication technologies, such as blogs (Sweetser & Kaid, 2008;Sweetser, Porter, Chung, & Kim, 2008), Facebook (Park, Kee, & Valenzuela, 2009;Raacke & Bonds-Raacke, 2008;Urista, Dong, & Day, 2009), and Twitter (Chen, 2011;Clavio & Kian, 2010;Hambrick, Simmons, Greenhalgh, & Greenwell, 2010 (Clavio, 2008;Frederick, Clavio, Burch, & Zimmerman, 2012). In particular, research on the motivations and gratifications of Facebook use involved convenient information seeking, entertaining arousal, gainful companionship, self-expression, socialization, self-status, staying in touch with friends, making new acquaintances, convenient communication curiosity about others, and relationship formation (Hanson, Haridakis, Cunningham, Sharma, & Ponder, 2010;Park et al, 2009;Raacke & Bonds-Raacke, 2008;Urista et al, 2009).…”

“…Research has started to explore how sports organizations (Waters et al, 2010;Wallace et al, 2011;Pronschinske et al, 2012), athletes (Kassing & Sanderson, 2010;Hambrick et al, 2010;Pegoraro, 2010;Hambrick & Mahoney, 2011;Sanderson, 2011), and fans (Clavio & Kian, 2010) use social media. Sport organizations, teams, and athletes have increasingly used social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to engage in dialogues and to establish relationships with their respective audiences (Blaszka et al, 2012).…”

Fan motives for interacting on social media – the example of the International Table Tennis Federation and Facebook

“…Gibbs, O'Reilly, & Brunette 2014;Pronschinske, Groza, & Walker 2012;Waters et al, 2011) and athletes (e.g. Hambrick et al, 2010;Kassing & Sanderson, 2010;Pegoraro, 2010). By examining football college sport fans' engagement in sport-focused social media, Clavio & Walsh (2014) revealed the prevalence of interactivity and information-gathering purposes as fans' motives for using social media.…”

Success of Mixed Martial Arts Video Topics on YouTube

“…Those included problems why people seek sport content online (Carlson, Rosenberger & Muthaly 2003;Hur, Ko & Valacich, 2007;Hong & Raney, 2007;Seo & Green 2008;Clavio & Kian, 2010) or use specific forms of social media (Clavio & Cooper 2010). Another intriguing subject was related to content itself, detecting characteristic and aim of a message (Kassing & Sanderson, 2010;Hambrick et al, 2010, Pegoraro, 2010. In most of these attempts uses and gratification (McQuail 1984) and disposition theories (Bryant & Zillmann 2002) were utilized as a research background.…”