Analyzing Social Media Interactivity and Emerging Sports Leagues

Julia L. Hillman*, Isabelle Henney* and Cheyenne Ballard*, Reed College of Media, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26505

Field (Broad Category): Communications/Journalism (Behavioral & Social Sciences) 

Student’s Major: ADPR 

Over the past decade, Twitter has become a platform that has given sports leagues, teams, and athletes the ability to interact personally and quickly with their fans (Chinn et al., 2014). Through hashtags, fans can not only interact with content from emerging sports leagues, teams, and athletes but also with other fans during sporting events (Clavio & Walsh, 2012). Past studies have also analyzed how sports fans interact with different kinds of content posted by leagues, teams, and players on Twitter (Anderson, 2018). Not only is content a factor when studying fan interactivity, but motivations like entertainment and fanship as well as economic and social constraints contribute to fan interactivity (Witkemper et al., 2012). While these interactions have been studied to an extent, less has been done to research the motivations driving fans to interact with content centered around and produced by emerging sports teams, organizations, and players. The current study analyses the interactivity between fans and both the re-launched XFL and last year’s failed Alliance of American Football (AAF) on Twitter. By using a focus group, an online survey and social network analysis, this research is collecting data from sports fans across the U.S. Through analysis of the twitter accounts of users who have interacted with tweets from both the XFL and AAF official Twitter accounts, and the personal motivations for that interactivity, recommendations can be made on how best to boost fan interactivity on social media for emerging sports leagues. 

Funding: 

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: Other