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Although social media has gained significant notoriety, there remains a “missing link” in examining engagement in the sport context. While the why, what, and whom have been explored, the where and when have received considerably less uptake. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to examine social media engagement for professional sports teams to determine optimal when and where points of user engagement, and the relationship between impressions and engagement. Over two billion data points from 108,124 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts were collected from four professional sports teams between 2017 and 2019. Findings from a regression analysis indicate that both when and where variables significantly predicted impression, and findings from the correlation analysis indicate that impression and engagement are nearly identical. These findings show fan engagement in the context of professional sport teams, prompting scholars to consider the impacts of time and platform, and encourage practitioners to rethink posting on Twitter, the least engaging of the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter platforms.

The rise in popularity of combat sports has afforded fighters an enhanced celebrity status, especially across online platforms that provide fans the opportunity to engage with and discuss their favorite athletes. Given this growth, fighters’ behaviors, both inside and outside of the arena, can have a strong influence on fans’ consumption and social media activity. To evaluate this relationship, this study investigated the effect of combat sports fighters’ trash talking on subsequent fans’ behaviors by collecting and analyzing 516 fighter responses during prefight press conferences and 32,360 fan tweets on Twitter during Ultimate Fighting Championship events. Results demonstrated that fights featuring polarizing and popular athletes generated the highest pay-per-view numbers, and higher levels of profanity speech during trash talking were associated with higher engagement in pay-per-view consumption and Twitter usage.

This study offers a unique opportunity to understand audiences’ multiplatform experiences during the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The authors conducted surveys in three countries—China, Germany, and the United States—to determine relationships between and among structural and identity factors that predicted viewership in each country. Results indicate that structural factors significantly predicted World Cup viewing on TV across all three countries, although some variation existed related to access. Furthermore, fandom and identity were significant predictors of viewing on digital platforms across all three countries. By better measuring the experiences and relationships within each country, this study offers a unique opportunity to present a true cross-country assessment to help build understanding of how global mega events are viewed across the world.

Hibbert et al.’s relationally reflexive practice framework guided the authors to develop a new sport leadership generative partnership model emphasizing privileging practice and the sport sector as it relates to researching, teaching, and practicing sport leadership. The 2019 North American Society for Sport Management symposium on sport leadership, titled “The Changing Face of Leadership Within Sport: What Does the Future Hold?” acted as a springboard for deep, reflexive conversations among the authors. Through the development of our model, we purposely highlight the process of a relationally reflexive journey making sense of our lived experiences, engaging with learnings from the symposium, and arguing that sport leadership and followership research and teaching ultimately should be about improving the sport sector within specific cultural contexts. We offer critically conscious considerations for privileging and embedding practice as part of sport management teaching, research, and service.

This study examined differences in the Seven Network’s primetime coverage of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games on all of its channels. Over 102 hr of total coverage was analyzed for clock time, name mentions, and the descriptions of athletes by announcers divided by gender. Results found that male athletes received the bulk of the clock time; 13 of the top 20 most-mentioned athletes were men. There were also gender differences in the word for word descriptors of success, failure, physicality, and personality. From a theoretical perspective, results found the framing of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games to favor male Olympians. The top three sports that were broadcast featuring women were ice hockey, freestyle skiing, and snowboarding, which differs from other studies in this line of scholarship, so differences in the sports covered in the Australian context provides a unique context to study the Winter Olympics. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.

The purpose of this study was to: (a) investigate the actual positions in digital communications; (b) assess the relationship between position-congruity among intended positions (i.e., how a firm desires to be perceived by consumers), actual brand positions, and perceived brand positions (i.e., the perceptions that customers have in their minds); and (c) understand the role of actual positioning (AP) in the positioning process. Multiple methods (one-on-one and focus group interviews, content analysis) were applied to analyze positions. Brand managers, golf consumers, and digital advertisements in Golf Digest magazine were sampled. Content analysis, frequencies and percentages, percentage difference, and regression analysis were performed for all positions for each research brand. The results revealed that: (a) tangibility-based positions (88.5%: great quality, innovation) outnumbered intangibility-based ones (11.5%: tour performance, tradition) in digital AP, (b) there was no positive correlation between the degree of congruence between intended and AP and the degree of congruence between intended and perceived positioning, and (c) the AP mediated between intended and perceived positioning in the brand positioning model. The study provides empirical evidence for the mediating role of AP and suggests modifications to the previous positioning process.

Social media use by student-athletes has become a topic of concern for interscholastic athletic directors. The recent Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. Supreme Court case highlighted how student speech has evolved in the digital age. This study explored how Texas interscholastic athletic directors view social media policy implementation and the effect it has on student-athlete behavior. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 13 athletic directors across all six University Interscholastic League enrollment classifications. Analysis revealed that athletic directors do have legal concerns when restricting online off-campus speech but see a need for promoting positive social media use by their student-athletes. The results suggest high school athletic departments must update their policies frequently to ensure that the information relayed to student-athletes is current, relevant, and based on recent case law.

Sports organizations’ use of social media (SM) has become a key strategy in the coverage and promotion of sport. Although research has been done on the success of digital marketing for men’s professional sport, little is known about the impact of such in women’s sport. This study aimed to examine the SM activity and engagement with fans of the Women’s National Basketball Association. All posts from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the 2019 calendar year were collected from all 12 Women’s National Basketball Association teams and analyzed, in aggregate, for their SM metrics. Results indicated that there was a high level of interaction on SM during the in-season competition months, whereas engagement during the off-season period declined. Given these results, the Women’s National Basketball Association should create strategies to increase fan engagement when there is decreased interactivity to perpetually promote women’s sport. This research provides a starting point for future research on women’s sport involving SM metrics.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) utilizes a unique pay-per-view (PPV) product distribution structure, and relies heavily on social media to promote its events. Yet, no research has examined how UFC fans’ social media motivation influences their consumption. Using uses and gratifications theory and a mixed-method design, this study qualitatively explored the themes of UFC fans’ social media motivations and identified five themes (i.e., information, convenience, social interaction, entertainment, and economic). Based on these themes, this study developed the Scale of Social Media Motivation through quantitative analyses and further investigated how Scale of Social Media Motivation factors would affect consumption behavior by incorporating fan identification as a mediator. The findings revealed that the factors were positively associated with purchase intentions when fan identification serves as a partial mediator. Discussions are focused on utilizing the social media motivation factors and nurturing fan identification to promote UFC consumption.