Self-Marketing Strategies of Elite Sportmen through the Media

Abstract

Social media became such a way where people could share easily about themselves, like continuously refreshing network and enabling multiple communication. At the same time people sharing instant photos and videos led to real life transforming to virtual. That transformation exposed at sport sector so as especially professional sportmen begin to address their fans and communicate with social media. In this context our study aimed to examine how strategies elite sportmen from different branches follow while self-marketing on social media. Two popular and also active twitter users sportmen from each football, basketball, tennis, american football, baseball and golf branches participated to the study. In our study content analysis method from qualitative research methodologies used for examining twitter accounts. Tweets of sportmen from the years 2019 and 2018 examined with references of Pegoraro’s (2010) study which are “relating to personal life, relating to business life, relating to their sport, other sport or athlete reference, responding to fans, pop culture or landmark reference”. According to the results of 12 months research showed that Ronaldo raised his follows and became first with 8M, though Ian Paulter lost 100K follows during this time. While tweet champs were footballers with 110 tweets in 2018, in 2019 the basketballers took top with 117 tweets. Comparison of 2019 vs 2018 twitterers concluded that Lebron James is the champ of both. Keywords: elite sportmen, self marketing, social media. DOI: 10.7176/JSTR/7-01-02