Online Engagement in the Sports Industry: Leagues, Athletes, and Sponsoring Brands

This paper aims to investigate three pillars of social media sports marketing engagement (quantitatively and qualitatively): (i) engagement with a sports league (event), (ii) engagement with the celebrity athletes, and (iii) engagement with the sponsoring brands. To achieve these three objectives, several posts on Instagram were monitored: (i) 145 posts from the surf sports league to compare gender and 57 to compare country of origin (ii) 737 posts from 13 famous athletes competing in the league (407 male and 300 female) (iii) and 763 posts containing information of 32 sponsoring brands. The Instrack, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Azure ML and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests were done. The results indicate factors such as gender and country of origin of the athlete posted significantly affect engagement with the World Surf League Instagram page (quantitatively and qualitatively). Additionally, gender, country of origin, professional experience, and attractiveness of the athletes affect the personal engagement of their own Instagram pages (quantitatively and qualitatively). Thirdly, the brand sponsoring the post also affects the level of engagement (quantitatively and qualitatively). A holistic view of the event, the athletes competing, and the sponsoring brands further contributes through new literature.