Professional Athletes’ Visual Self-Presentation Strategies: An Investigation on Instagram

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine how professional athletes in different branches perform their visual self-presentation on Instagram, a social media platform. Embedded design, one of the mixed methods, examined 24 professional athletes. To create the group for study in this research, including football, basketball, tennis and track and field athletes, we used criterion sampling, a purposeful sampling method. Specifically, a total of 5030 posted photos and 854 videos were analysed. In the study, we used thematic coding to conduct content analysis by the subject and purpose of the research (Geurin-Eagleman & Burch, 2016) as well as open coding. Chi-squared was calculated to measure gender differences. Most of the athletes’ shared contents and their likes and comments fell under the theme of business life, followed by personal life content. The professional athletes showed differences according to gender and sport in the themes of what they posted on Instagram. The men posted much more actively than the women. Athletes in individual sports also posted less content than team sport athletes. It was striking how little content these professional athletes, especially women and individual athletes, produced about their fans. This research can contribute to the diversification of research on the brand development and strengthening strategies of athletes in the Instagram application and to better understand the use of Instagram by professional athletes. It can also provide a perspective on Instagram usage strategies for professional athletes and athletes with high-performance potential.