Social Media Conversations About High Engagement Sports Team Brands

Abstract

This study conducts an analysis of social media discussions related to high engagement sports brands. More specifically, our study examined the English Premier League (EPL). Our study sought to retrieve data systematically over the same day, weekly, for a period of 5-months. After this process we had built twenty datasets and NodeXL was utilised to analyse the data. After we had this data we were able to use qualitative observations to identify key users and conversations that formed around the EPL as well as the connections between the conversations that arose from the brand’s posts and people involved in them. We also analysed the quantitative data underpinning our network visualisations to provide further insights. The most obvious initial finding was that when the EPL tweets, this prompted a large volume of conversations directly related to these tweets. However, we also noted that EPL tweets also help instigate further, sometimes unrelated tweets and conversations. More specifically, we identified that the visualised network of conversations was of a broadcast form, which is characterised by messages being generated by a central account (the EPL) and shared by a number of decentralised users. Based on our analysis we propose the SCISM framework that is likely to be of interest to brands that wish to promote, sustain, and benefit from their instigation of social media conversations.