Abstract

Athletes often use social media to help build their personal brand, communicate with stakeholders, and promote endorsements. Research suggests that athletes who elicit greater engagement on social media are more valuable to endorse brands than those who simply have a large number of followers. From a regulatory perspective, it is important for athlete endorsers to disclose the commercial nature of sponsored posts. Therefore, based on social influence theory (SIT), the purpose of this study was to examine Olympic athletes’ follower engagement on social media with a focus on brand mentions and disclosures of the relationships. Utilizing a content analysis of 190 US Olympic athletes’ tweets during the 2018 PyeongChang Games, findings revealed statistically significant differences in follower engagement based on the athlete’s gender. Non-brand-related posts received statistically significant greater engagement than brand-related posts, and only 12.90% of the posts that mentioned a brand disclosed a brand relationship. Implications and future research also are discussed.

摘要

运动员经常使用社交媒体来帮助建立他们的个人品牌、与利益相关者沟通并促进代言。研究表明，在社交媒体上引起更多参与的运动员比那些仅仅拥有大量追随者的运动员对品牌更有价值。从监管的角度来看，运动员代言人披露赞助帖子的商业性质很重要。因此，基于社会影响理论 (SIT)，本研究的目的是检查奥运运动员在社交媒体上的关注度，重点关注品牌提及和关系的披露。通过对 2018 年平昌冬奥会期间 190 名美国奥运运动员的推文进行内容分析，研究结果揭示了基于运动员性别的追随者参与度在统计上存在显着差异。与品牌相关的帖子相比，非品牌相关帖子的参与度在统计上显着更高，只有 12.90% 的帖子提到了品牌，披露了品牌关系。还讨论了影响和未来的研究。