Content Analysis of a Social Media Sports Platform Essay

This assignment is designed to give you an appreciation of the relationship between sports media organisations and engagement with sports fans online. 800 -1000 words (not including the information presented in the table)What you will need to do: Select a professional sporting organisation’s social media site e.g. Facebook or Twitter (it could be the AFL, NRL or A-League – or a particular club, or you can select another sporting organisation of your choice or a sports fan forum):

You need to find particular categories of organisation – fan engagement. For example, you might look for one or two of the following (or you may find other categories):

The number of posts or tweets about a specific player, coach or team success associated with a product/brand;
The number of promotions offering sports fans a prize (e.g. merchandise, free tickets) or experience (e.g. meeting players/coaches/sponsors);
The gender balance of fans engaging with the club/organisation (number of males versus females);
Evidence of fans BIRGing and CORFing online.
Based on your findings (from the data collected), what assumptions can you make about the interactions under analysis?

The information (data collected) should be presented in a table. The findings/analysis should be presented in paragraph form.

Criteria:

Appropriate choice of social media platform/online forum;
Thoroughness of coding;
Depth of analysis;
Written expression.
An excellent paper on conducting a media content analysis – McNamara, J 2005 ‘Media content analysis: Its uses, benefits and best practice methods’. Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal vol 6, no 1, pp 1-34

An example of a content analysis of a social media sports platform (Please note that this is a large study – your content analysis assignment will be significantly smaller) Wallace L, Wilson J & Miloch K 2011 ‘Sporting Facebook: A content analysis of NCAA organizational sports pages and big 12 conference athletic department pages, International Journal of Sport Communication, no. 4 pp 422-444

Additional Example:

Hambrick, ME, Simmons JM, Greenhalgh, GP & Greenwell, TC 2010 ‘Understanding professional athletes’ use of Twitter: A content analysis of athlete tweets, International Journal of Sport Communication. no 3, pp 454-471

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