Abstract
Social media have enabled sports fans to interact with their favourite clubs, players, and fellow fans. By using a sample of over 4.5 million tweets, we applied a social networks approach to examine whether and, if so, how different types of users influence online engagement and patterns of information flow of professional football clubs on Twitter. We focus on five types of social mediators (i.e., key users who connect organizations with their publics): (1) organizational (e.g., teams or players), (2) industry (e.g., competitors or associations), (3) media (e.g., journalists), (4) individual (e.g., fans), and (5) celebrities. Our results indicate that the power of media social mediators—the most traditional mediators—has declined over recent years, and they were negatively associated with engagement on Twitter. Instead, relationships between football clubs and publics were primarily mediated by individual social mediators, for top division clubs in particular. Taken together, scholars and practitioners should recognize the potential impact of social mediators, given that even individuals can function as powerful users in the information diffusion process.
Highlights
Social media have enabled sports fans to interact with their favourite clubs, players, and fellow fans
5,964 social mediators were identified (Figure 4); 4,405 social mediators were related to conversations about top division clubs and 1,559 social mediators were related to first division clubs
The results indicate that the proportion of organizational social mediators was significantly higher for first division clubs compared to top division clubs (z 1⁄4 À13.11, p < .001)
Summary
Social media have enabled sports fans to interact with their favourite clubs, players, and fellow fans. We focus on five types of social mediators (i.e., key users who connect organizations with their publics): (1) organizational (e.g., teams or players), (2) industry (e.g., competitors or associations), (3) media (e.g., journalists), (4) individual (e.g., fans), and (5) celebrities. By examining online sports communities through a network lens, we are able to understand how information diffuses from one individual, group, or organization to another within social networks (Hambrick, 2013) Exploring this topic for both top division and first division clubs does extend the scope of sports communication research in general (see, e.g., Clavio, Burch, & Frederick, 2012) but contributes to understanding the dynamics of online sports communities. We tested whether certain types of social mediators affect fan engagement on Twitter This advances earlier findings by testing which key users contribute to community-related behaviors (Schau et al, 2009; Yoshida et al, 2015), which might benefit sports teams and fellow fans
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