The applications of social media in sports marketing

Abstract

n the era of big data, sports consumer's activities in social media become valuable assets to sports marketers. In this paper, the authors review extant literature regarding how to effectively use social media to promote sports as well as how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions. Methods: The literature review method. Results: Our findings suggest that sports marketers can use social media to achieve the following goals, such as facilitating marketing communication campaigns, adding values to sports products and services, creating a two-way communication between sports brands and consumers, supporting sports sponsorship program, and forging brand communities. As to how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions, extent literature suggests that sports marketers to undertake traffic and engagement analysis on their social media sites as well as to conduct sentiment analysis to probe customer's opinions. These insights can support various aspects of business decisions, such as marketing communication management, consumer's voice probing, and sales predictions. Conclusion: Social media are ubiquitous in the sports marketing and consumption practices. In the era of big data, these ＂footprints＂ can now be effectively analyzed to generate insights to support business decisions. Recommendations to both the sports marketing practices and research are also addressed