Uses and Gratifications of a Retired Female Athlete’s Twitter Followers

Abstract

An Internet-based survey was posted on the Twitter feed of a retired female athlete to ascertain the demographics, uses, and gratifications of her feed’s followers. Analysis of the data revealed that followers were predominantly White, affluent, educated, and older than prior research into online audiences has shown. The perception of the athlete as being an expert at her sport was the most salient reason reported to follow the Twitter feed, followed by affinity for the athlete’s writing style. Analysis of variance uncovered 5 significant differences in item salience between male and female followers, with women more likely to use this Twitter feed because of affinity for the athlete and men more likely to use it because of perception of the athlete as physically attractive. Factor analysis uncovered 3 dimensions of gratification: an organic fandom factor, a functional fandom factor, and an interactivity factor.

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).…”

As redes sociais vão à bola: o papel social e mediático da informação interna no desporto

“…No campo do desporto publicaram-se pesquisas na área da receção das audiências, na sua relação com as redes sociais (e.g. Clavio, 2011;Clavio e Kian, 2010;Jenkins, 2006). A maioria dos estudos centrou-se nas características das redes sociais, nos seus aspetos demográficos e de consumo de informação por parte de diferentes audiências (Clavio, 2011 Chiweshe (2014).…”

Success of Mixed Martial Arts Video Topics on YouTube

“…Consequently, some researches were undertaken on recognizing new media attractiveness for sport consumers. 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.…”