Understanding the Value of Social Media in the NBA's Digital Communication: A Fan(s)' Perspective

Social media (SM) has become sports organizations’ most preeminent vehicle to engage with fans and to enhance relationship marketing. Prior studies have mostly focused on the standpoints of sports organizations; less is known about fans’ SM experience and perspective. This study focuses on sports fans’ SM use during a game, and seeks to understand their popular SM uses and gratifications and the effect of individual characteristics. Informed by the uses and gratifications theory (UGT), we analyze survey data of 400 season-ticket holders of a professional NBA team. Our quantitative data analysis suggests that during a game the NBA sports fans use SM for posting on Twitter & Facebook, on Instagram & Snapchat, and checking emails. The less popular uses and gratifications include accessing teams’ website, downloading video, and accessing mobile Apps. These usage behaviors varied by individual age, gender and household income. Research contribution and implications are discussed. 1. Motivation: Internet use in the U.S. In 2018, 77 percent of Americans owned a smartphone in the United States. According to Cisco [1], there will be 220 million Americans and 2.16 billion smartphones’ users worldwide by the end of 2018 with 4.3 devices per person connected to the Internet by 2020. When Pew Research Center began tracking social media adoption in 2005, just 5 percent of American adults used at least one of these platforms [2]. By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans, and today 69 percent of the public uses some type of social media. Social media (SM) has become sports organizations’ most eminent vehicle to engage with fans and to enhance team identification. Defined as a group of Internet-based platforms and applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0. , the SM platforms allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content [3]. It makes information instantly obtainable to view, comment on, and share among a large network of users. Social media can be distinguished by six overarching categories, including Wikipedia, blogs, content communities, virtual game worlds, virtual social worlds, and social networking sites [3]. This paper focuses on one type of social media, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Such technology-enabled information and communication capabilities have been increasingly recognized and utilized by sports organizations to enhance their communication strategies and build relationships with their fans. For example, by exploiting the digital communication capabilities of Facebook and Twitter, National Basketball Association (NBA) teams have been delivering relevant sports games’ information to their sports followers, thus personalizing their communications [4]. Likewise, social media is also found beneficial for a sports team’s branding [5]. As shown in a prior study [6], social media creates a digital proximity between fans and athletes, particularly for those sports figures that use social media to invite interaction and leverage engagement, thus increasing the brand value. Scholars have discussed the numerous opportunities provided by social media for relationship building [7, 8]. However, social media strategies implemented by professional sports teams may not always succeed nor fit all segments of the market. For example, two authors examined the relationship between social media addiction and sports fans’ identification and commitment, but did not find statistically significant relationship between heavy use of social media and high level of sports identification and commitment [9]. In addition, sports organizations have reported challenges in employing social media capabilities. According to a recent study, the interviews with twenty-six managers of professional sports teams from the four major leagues in North American – MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL—revealed six objectives for social media use and identified seven challenges of social media as a relationship-marketing medium [10]. As a result of those prior studies, the scholars caution sports organizations about using one-size-fit-all Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2019 URI: https://hdl.handle. net/10125/59680 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-2-6 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Page 2417 approach when designing and implementing their social media-oriented digital marketing strategies. Moreover, prior studies have mostly focused on the standpoints of sports organizations; less is known about fans’ social media use experience and perspective. There is only a partial understanding in the literature as to how sport fans perceive the worth of social media in keeping and improving connections with their favorite sport teams [11]. Yet, it is important for sports management to understand sports fans’ experience with and values in digital communications for several reasons. First, such enhanced understanding will not only enable sports organizations to design effective, personalized digital communication [4] but also reach targeted segments of fans to maximize the marketing efforts for fans experience and team commitment [9]. Second, a focus on fans’ perspective will complement prior studies from the viewpoints of sports organizations and managers, as sports fans and teams’ marketing directors have shown disagreements on the effectiveness of marketing techniques [12]. In the context of widespread social media usage in the age of connected stadiums [13], it has become critical to better understand how sports teams can initiate and sustain a dialogue online, and create more interactivity in the periphery of live games to provide a higher service quality for demanding fans. This study also aims at contributing to sports communication and relationship marketing literature by suggesting empirical evidence of the fans’ needs and wants for sports organizations’ digital content from users’ standpoint. Our goal is to deliver high-level practical inputs for sports organizations’ digital marketing strategies. In particular, this study seeks to answer two critical questions: (1) What are the popular uses and gratifications for sports fans to use social media during a game? (2) How do the uses and gratifications differ by individual characteristics? To address the questions, we draw upon the uses and gratifications theory (UGT) and analyze survey data collected from season-ticket holders of a professional NBA team based in a large metropolitan city in the west region of United States. Our quantitative data analysis has shown significant findings, including different patterns of digital communications between ticket holders with dissimilar preferences by fans’ age, gender and tenure of being a season ticket holder. The originality of this study is twofold: (1) to the best of our knowledge, it is the first study to survey the use of digital communication portfolio (including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, sports team websites, emails) from sports fans’ stance; (2) it provides an in-depth comprehension of digital sports consumption by sports fans’ segments characterized by member preferences and individual demographics. The paper is structured as follows. First, we describe the investigative context with the case of an NBA franchise. It is followed by a literature review on social media marketing in sports management and its drivers, as well as the investigation undertaken to test the conceptual framework. We then present the research site and data collection effort among an NBA franchise. The Findings section presents the results and discusses the implications for sports organization related to digital marketing and the use social media to engage with sports fans. The paper concludes with critical implications, contributions and suggestions for future research. Below we present the investigative context of NBA and the nature and importance of season ticket holder population. 2. Investigative context 2.1. The National Basketball Association The National Basketball Association is a men's professional basketball league in North America, consisting of 30 teams. It is widely considered to be the premier men's professional basketball league in the world. NBA is considered one of the four dominant professional sports leagues in the U.S., beside the other three namely the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Hockey League (NHL). As one of the most popular and global sports brand it has grown a strong social media presence. The league is currently the most followed league across Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, Instagram and other social media combined with more than 1.3 billion followers, and the first league ever on SnapChat with a record of 30.1 billion impressions and 4.2 billion video views. On YouTube, the NBA uploads a multitude of videos every day: these videos include highlights, montages, interviews, and talk shows. Though the league trails the NFL in profits, the NBA has profited from the visibility of its celebrities as a differentiating tactic. Players are extensions of their franchise but can also exist alone, as ambassadors of the league, its brand, and its values. The NBA's official Twitter account has more followers (13.8 million) than the NFL's (10.8 million) and the MLB's (4.3 million). The National Hockey League (NHL), for those who are wondering, has 3.3 million followers on its official Twitter account. The NBA is a very visible sport. Whether it’s behind-the-scenes footage on Snapchat or real-time game highlights on Twitter, the league’s nonrestrictive policies on sharing video content allow fans to see the