Social Media Increases Fan Interest Among Sports Teams

New findings published in the Journal of Sports Management show that it's extremely beneficial for professional sports teams to engage with their brands via social media on Facebook, Twitter and other similar environments.

Researchers at the University of Missouri and Louisiana State University discovered that when individual teams released information from their Twitter accounts, such as score updates or player profiles, it helped to boost the number of followers linked with that account and the social media image of the organization, overall.

"The common way of thinking for businesses, including professional sports is that they need to be on social media," study author Brian Soebbing said in a news release. "However, little research has been done on how businesses and organizations can maximize their consumer engagement and interaction on social media, and thus, very few best practices exist that are backed by research."

For the study, researchers analyzed the Twitter accounts of 30 MLB teams throughout 13 consecutive months. Each day, the numbers would rise and fall when it came to followers based on numerous factors. However, researchers were better able to gauge what activities might increase the likelihood of gaining more Twitter followers.

Findings revealed that daily increase in content creation helped to successfully increase followers overall and user engagement.

"We found that trends such as an increased number of total tweets from an account over a long period of time, as well as long winning streaks, overall winning percentage, and how often teams played on national television all helped increase the number of followers a team had on its Twitter account," added researcher Grace Yan. "On the other hand, long losing streaks and fewer tweets in general correlated with losses in total numbers of followers."