Customer engagement on social media: an examination of NFL teams’ Instagram posts

Abstract

PurposeSocial media enables sport organizations to connect with customers in a dynamic, ubiquitous, and timely manner. Although these organizations routinely use social media, the best practices to improve customer engagement remain elusive. This paper aims to examine National Football League (NFL) teams’ Instagram posts to understand how sport teams can utilize social media to drive customer engagement.Design/methodology/approachGuided by uses and gratification theory, the author employs a machine learning algorithm to assess the content of NFL teams’ posts from the 2013–2014 season to the 2017–2018 season. The author performs regression analyses to investigate how post topic, together with confounding factors, boost customer engagement.FindingsResults highlight the importance of informational content in eliciting engagement and reveal distinctions in topics deemed “social content” in the literature. The author further identifies variations in how post topics engage sport fans and general customers.Originality/valueResults provide implications for sport organizations to craft social media content for customer engagement.