The Role of Social Media to Attract Virtual Basketball Championship’s Participant during Pandemic Era

Abstract

The Corona Virus originating from China entered Indonesia in March 2020. Regarding the number of infections caused by the Corona Virus in various parts of the world, the spread of this virus can be said to be a Pandemic. The pandemic has also caused public facilities and infrastructure to be temporarily closed, such as sports arenas, stadiums so that these things affect various activities, for example organizing sports events. Those statement showed that innovations related to organizing sports events are starting to emerge by involving technology in its implementation or it can be called virtual championships. With this condition, organizing committee needs to use technology for promoting their sport events, one solution that can be occurred is using social media. The purpose of this study was to measure the role of social media in attracting participants in a virtual basketball championship during a pandemic. This research is a quantitative research with a non-experimental research design. This study used survey methods and questionnaire sampling techniques. The sample used was 30 respondents. Social media variables include social media as a medium of information, product reviews, brand equity and brand attitude. Data processing using IBM SPSS 25 software. The results of this study found that the role of social media in attracting participants was categorized as strong and social media had a 48.9% influence in attracting participants. It can be concluded from this research that social media has a strong role to attract participants in the virtual basketball championship.