How fans are engaging with baseball teams demonstrating multiple objectives on Instagram

Abstract

Purpose Using uses and gratifications theory as a guide, the purpose of this paper is to examine how fans are engaging with Major League Baseball (MLB) teams that are utilizing Instagram postings to demonstrate sporting, business, and social objectives. Design/methodology/approach An analysis of 1,500 photos (50 from each team) was conducted. A content analysis analyzed the content of the photo, and a textual analysis was implemented to examine the use of hashtags by the teams on their Instagram photos. Findings Posts that overly demonstrated the business and social objectives had some of the lowest numbers of likes and comments, indicating that fan engagement is not often achieved through these methods. Originality/value Results of this research demonstrate that while MLB teams are able to address their multiple objectives on Instagram, fans are not necessarily interested in all three of these efforts. Posts about on-field action, consumer buying opportunities, and charitable efforts were all created by the majority of teams, but the sporting objective posts had, by far, the highest average number of both likes and comments when compared to the charitable and promotional objectives of the teams. Therefore, the results provide some best practices for teams looking to use the photo and video sharing network.

Spanish Winter Olympic athlete’s communication on Instagram

“…Relating the relationship between type of post, it is striking that images, besides being much more abundant, are less effective than videos when it comes to generating comments and similar effective on generating likes, this could be due Instagram is still understood by athletes as a photography social media. The use of hashtags (#), mentions (@) or emoticons do not seem to have much incidence in the interaction with audiences; this result is consistent with other previous investigations such as those of Geurin-Eagleman and Burch (2016) or Kim and Hull (2017), which even detect a negative correlation between the use of hashtags and mentions with the number of likes and comments.…”

“…Geurin-Eagleman and Burch (2016) show how athletes use this social network as a tool to build their personal image, finding a relation between the engagement with the variety of photos and noting that sexually suggestive posts reach a greater number of likes and comments. Likewise, Kim and Hull (2017) states that baseball team followers on Instagram engage more (with comments and likes) to posts related to sports issues than to those that have to do with social or business issues. Other recent studies focus on specific aspects such as the use of Instagram to challenge or reinforce gender stereotypes (Pegoraro et al, 2018) or strategies to attract Hispanic followers, in the case of baseball, through the use of language (Hull et al, 2018).…”

Branding in pictures: using Instagram as a brand management tool in professional team sport organisations

“…Others have investigated how sport leagues can use YouTube for agenda-setting purposes (Zimmerman, Clavio, & Lim, 2011). Recent studies have examined how Instagram can be used for engaging fans for sporting, business as well as social objectives (Kim & Hull, 2017); as a self-presentation tool by Olympic athletes specifically (Geurin- Eagleman & Burch, 2016), or by professional athletes more generally (Smith & Sanderson, 2015). More in relation to the present study, yet outside the professional teams' context, Geurin- Eagleman and Burch (2017) found that sport brands that utilise user-generated content on their Instagram accounts elicit higher engagement from followers when posts have an overt focus on the product.…”

Sports, Instagram, and conflict talk in Englishes

“…Among the online venues readily available these days, Instagram occupies a powerful position. Citing Elliott (), Kim and Hull (, p. 216) assert that ‘Instagram's per‐follower engagement rate (or total number of likes, comments, or shares on a post) is more than ten times greater than Facebook and more than 100 times greater than Twitter.’ This study will look at Instagram, which needs attention from sociolinguists considering its significant role in many online users’ daily linguistic activities. Regarding sport fan identity, most studies discuss group sports and expert or quasi‐expert discourse (see Cox, for research on sports blogging and the Detroit Red Wings hockey blog Winging it in Motown ).…”