Identity in Twitter’s Hashtag Culture: A Sport-Media-Consumption Case Study

Cho

2019

The purpose of this study was to explore sports fans’ hashtags usage for information sharing over social media on the basis of the theory of interpersonal behavior. We collected data from 323 social media users who have employed hashtags to exchange sports-related information during the past 12 months. The structural equation modeling confirmed affect, perceived usefulness, perceived reciprocity, and social factors as motivators of the intention to share information. Other motivators, including habit and facilitating conditions, function as predictors of actual hashtags posting among sport fans. In deriving empirical evidence and novel insights into the role of hashtags, this research elevated our understanding of information circulation among sport fans over social media and serves as a foundation for inquiries into hashtag adoption in sport domains.

Section: Why Sport Contexts?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical and Practical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information-Sharing Behaviors Among Sports Fans Using #Hashtags

Cho

2019

“…Frederick et al, 2012;Kassing & Sanderson, 2010), and social identity theory (e.g. Smith & Smith, 2012).…”

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confidence: 99%

Twitter as Disruptive Innovation in Sport Communication

Pegoraro

2014

This Twitter Research Forum essay by Ann Pegoraro, one of the leading sport management and marketing scholars on social media, focuses on the need to study Twitter as a disruptive innovation in sport communication. Making a case that Twitter has disrupted the one-to-many, single-medium framework of sport consumption traditionally offered by television to the many-to-many possibilities of Internet-enabled sport participatory consumption, Pegoraro poses that Twitter’s disruptiveness is distinctive in that it was up to the users to define how this platform would be used. Noting varied response to research on Twitter and sport, it is argued that the research process and the building of theory is necessarily not a neat and tidy direct line process. In observing that much research on Twitter and sport to date has ported many of the categories of research agendas and key theories that have driven earlier research on media and sport, the essay concludes that the research process that has been started portends hope for future comprehensive theoretical analysis.

“…While the impact of digital media on the sport fan experience has been well established (Hutchins & Rowe, 2013), limited consideration has been given to sport fandom on image-centric social media. To date, research has focused on text-dominant platforms like Twitter (Kassing & Sanderson, 2010; Smith & Smith, 2012), Facebook (Frederick, Pegoraro, & Burch, 2017; Sanderson, 2013), and Tumblr (Kunert, 2019). Researchers have begun to consider the utility of visual social media for increasing sport fan interactivity on the application Snapchat (Billings, Qiao, Conlin, & Nie, 2017) and audience engagement with sport network Instagram accounts (Romney & Johnson, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

Self-Representations of Women’s Sport Fandom on Instagram at the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup

Toffoletti

Pegoraro

Comeau

2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate how fans of women’s sport are using Instagram to self-represent their fandom. It uses the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup (WWC) as a case study to examine the ways in which fans at a women’s sport event express their fandom through images and to consider the social and political dimensions of using Instagram for promoting women’s sport. Instagram pictures containing the event-related hashtags #FIFAWWC, #LiveYourGoals, #SheBelieves, and #CanadaRed were collected over the tournament duration. From a content analysis of 3,605 images, the authors argue that visual networked platforms are facilitating online communication conventions within sport fan communities that function as forms of social presence to legitimate women’s participation as fans and generate visibility for women’s sport. By demonstrating that the production and sharing of visual content related to sport events have become important features of the contemporary sport fan experience, this article advocates for greater recognition of social media practices alongside conventional measures of sport fan engagement.