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With a growing number of people using social media such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, it has become extremely important for professional athletes to build and promote their personal brands through social media. The purpose of this study was to understand how LPGA Tour Korean golfers use social media for self-presentation. Through content analysis, the self-presentation forms of the top six Korean LPGA Tour golfers were examined. The result showed that the golfers are more likely to use the form of the front stage rather than the backstage. The number of likes and comments is higher when golfers post backstage photos and write photo stories in both Korean and English languages on Instagram. This study contributes to the field of sport social media research theoretically with new subcategorization to Goffman’s self-presentation and suggests a new insight into personal brand marketing strategies via social media for both athletes and sponsors.

Physical activity (PA) has been associated with a multitude of beneficial mental and physical outcomes. It is well documented, however, that there are health disparities and inequities for segments of the population, especially as related to PA. Engagement of traditionally minoritized populations into research is essential for justice in health. We discuss a community engagement model that can be used for recruiting and retaining traditionally minoritized populations into PA research, and then we go into three major ethnic/racial groups in the United States: Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Background information of each group, cultural values that play a role in health for each of the groups, and research demonstrating how culture plays a role in the formation and implementation of PA interventions in these groups is presented.

Despite increasing access to sport and exercise opportunities, girls and women in Canada continue to face gender disparity in sport participation. Several media campaigns have emerged to address this disparity and advocate for gender equity in sport. However, there is little understanding or evaluation of the content of these media campaigns. Informed by sport participation research, the She’s Got It All campaign was designed to highlight the challenges and intersecting disadvantages that girls and women face in sport. The purpose of the current study was to assess the textual and visual content of this campaign. The posters (N = 48) were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis (text) and deductive content analysis (visual) to identify the characteristics of the images and the themes in the messages. Based on the thematic analysis, seven main themes pertaining to girls’ and women’s barriers to sport participation are identified including physiology, gendered social behaviors, intrapersonal beliefs, environmental contexts, stereotypes, female representation, and interpersonal support. Based on the content analysis, most of the models presented in the posters are perceived as White and average-sized adult women, with visible muscle definition, slightly or nonrevealing clothing, and performing an individual sport. The poster visual and text material seem to miss opportunities to highlight the experiences of girls and women identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or sometimes questioning), and others and those classified as lower socioeconomic status. These findings provide foundational information for future research and media campaign designed to target gender equity in sport.

Several scholars have examined how sport stars and other celebrities establish personal brands on social media, but few studies have used a longitudinal research design to study the self-branding process itself and measure changes in self-branding behaviors over time. Based on a content analysis of 6,240 images posted on Instagram by 112 top-ranked professional disc golfers, this study shows how self-branding is a common practice even among the players of this lesser known sport. Drawing on Goffman’s work on impression management, self-branding is conceptualized as goal-oriented, strategic communication. The players’ uptake in self-branding may be a response to the disc golf industry’s rapid growth and new opportunities to market products on social media. While the study partially supports this perspective, it also reveals an interesting contradiction. Many players engaged in self-branding regardless of their social status or ability to monetize their personas. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, and capital may help explain why self-branding is so widespread among lifestyle athletes.

The use of social media is reflective of an individual’s culture. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of the cultural context on Australian and Singaporean sportswomen’s uses of social media. In-depth interviews with 12 elite sportswomen from both countries combined with supplementary information collected through the participating athletes’ Instagram profiles showed that social media uses are influenced by uncertainty avoidance, individualism or collectivism, masculinity or femininity, and long- or short-term orientations. By applying Hofstede and Bond’s cultural dimensions framework, the study presents new knowledge on three cultural dimensions (i.e., uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, and long-term vs. short-term orientation) and broadens the field of sport and social media by comparing the use of social media between athletes from diverse cultures. The study offers significant insight for designing a branding strategy that encompasses cultural contexts to guide athletes on their use of social media.

Sports betting in the United States is exploding in popularity and has the potential to change the way sports fans interact with sports properties and sports content. However, not all sports bettors are the same, and market segmentation research provides a resource for more targeted communication and marketing strategies. Utilizing behavioral and psychographic data, the current study segmented 1,077 sports bettors by involvement. The segments were then contrasted on a number of factors within the framework of Mowen’s 3M model of motivation and personality. A sample of 513 nonbetting sports fans was also included as a segment within the analyses. Statistically significant differences were found at the motivational, elemental, compound, and surface trait levels between the betting segments and between the betting and the nonbetting sports fans. The findings point to a strong emotional draw regardless of involvement yet a clear need for the betting industry to educate on issues related to jurisdictional legality and common language.

While sports fandom and social media advertising have been widely studied, and all major, professional teams use social media campaigns for direct sales, there is surprisingly little research on the relationship between fans’ social media engagement behavior (SMEB) and their purchase intention (PI), and none that differentiates PI across different platforms and sports contexts. This study addresses those gaps by exploring (a) how different kinds of fans engage their teams’ advertising on various social media and (b) how those different behaviors predict PI in different contexts. To do so, we utilized an SMEB framework to interpret survey data (N = 452) of U.S. sports fans’ social media engagement with their favorite teams over six popular platforms for two situations—in-game and out-of-game. Regression analyses determined the extent to which those behaviors predict PI across different sports and platforms during and outside of games. Our results show that fan SMEB varies by sport, platform, and situation. Furthermore, we found that information-acquiring social media behaviors—such as checking scores—best predict PI in-game, while fan-identity cultivation social media behaviors—such as posting—best predict PI out-of-game. In addition, PI predictability varies across platform and game situation, but not across age, gender, or even level of fandom. By contextualizing the relationship between fan SMEB and PI, our study lays a foundation to address these lingering gaps in the sport communication literature while providing actionable insights for teams and brands seeking more effective sales campaigns across an array of social media.

Physical activity policy can play a crucial role in ensuring that individuals, communities, and societies can obtain the wide range of health benefits associated with regular physical activity participation. Policies such as Title IX, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and state physical education laws have all increased opportunities for millions of Americans to participate in physical activity. With that said, how policies are developed and implemented vary considerably. The purpose of this manuscript is to contrast an academic conceptual framework with a pragmatic approach for policy implementation. In an ideal world, polices would be developed from foundational knowledge, scaled up to community-level interventions, and implemented in a sequential fashion. However, policy implementation is a disorderly process that requires a practical methodology. The National Physical Activity Plan encompasses strategies and tactics across 10 key societal sectors—and highlights the disorderly process of policy implementation across the various sectors.

Dissemination and implementation (D&I) science can be described as the scientific study of the strategies and mechanisms by which scientific evidence is disseminated and implemented in community or clinical settings to improve outcomes for a specified population. This paper provides an overview of D&I science as it relates to health and physical activity promotion. It provides definitions and specifications for D&I strategies and an overview of the types of theories, models, and frameworks used to advance this work. Finally, this review demonstrated the need for physical activity researchers to (a) test relationships between changes in D&I explanatory constructs and D&I outcomes; (b) determine the utility of D&I strategies, based on explanatory theories, to improve intervention reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance; (c) develop strategies to take interventions to scale and reduce disparities; and (d) develop interventions and D&I strategies, in collaboration with those who would ultimately be responsible for implementation.