A new research has proposed that better social media techniques used by sites namely Facebook and Twitter increase fan interest and their engagement to the sites.
The study conducted by University of Missouri found that the more individual teams released original content from their Twitter accounts, such as score updates or player profiles, the more followers they gained and engagement they initiated. The researchers say their findings could provide guidance for many businesses struggling with how to use social media.
Brian Soebbing, a coauthor on the study, said that the common way of thinking for businesses, including professional sports was that they needed to be on social media, however, little research had been done on how businesses and organizations could maximize their consumer engagement and interaction on social media, and thus, very few best practices exist that were backed by research.
Soebbing said that this study showed what worked to drive fan or customer engagement, as well as what was not successful. Business managers know they need to be on social media, yet many did not know how to handle social media metrics to maximize positive outcomes for their businesses.
Twitter accounts of all 30 MLB teams over 13 consecutive months were analyzed and by monitoring the daily rise and fall in the number of followers for each team's account and combining those trends with the amount of activity from each account, the researchers were able to determine which activities led to gaining more Twitter followers.
The researchers found that day-to-day increases in content creation and differences in team success on the field caused little change in the number of Twitter followers. However, they found that larger trends made significant differences in fan engagement and total followers for each account.
Watanabe and his colleagues also found that while higher levels of activity on teams' Twitter accounts such as original content creation led to more followers, that trend did not apply to activities such as "favoriting" or "re-tweeting" messages produced by other people. The researchers say that although this study focuses on MLB teams, the findings can apply to teams in all professional sports, as well as many businesses looking to engage fans with their brands.
The study is published in the Journal of Sport Management.
