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This study examines Olympic champions’ characteristics on Instagram to first understand how age and gender affect the characteristics and their interrelations and second to see if the future changes in those characteristics are predictable. We crawled Instagram data of individual gold medalists in the Rio2016 Olympics for four months and utilized a...
Citations
... Instagram serves to connect users, while offering them interesting opportunities for socialisation and for creating online communities (Serafinelli, 2017). As a network devoted more to entertainment than to information (Lee et al., 2015), it offers brands the opportunity to reach their audiences, for it generates high levels of interactivity and engagement (Bodaghi and Oliveira, 2022;Dhanesh et al., 2022) between the former and the latter. In this vein, there is a proliferation of studies of celebrities on Instagram, like that performed by Lee et al. (2021) on the impartiality of celebrity opinions, plus plenty of enquiries into effectiveness in relation to congruity and self-expression (Lee et al., 2022), the emotional and rational mechanisms used by brands (Ahmadi et al., 2023) and the consumer-brand relationship of young Instagram users (Copeland et al., 2023). ...
Purpose
The aim of this paper, which analyses the use of sports celebrities in advertising discourse, is to understand the strategic use to which brands put them in their commercial and corporate communication on Instagram.
Design/methodology/approach
To this end, a content analysis was performed on the Instagram posts of the brands Santander, Movistar, Red Bull and Iberdrola during the period 2021-2022.
Findings
The results indicate that, strategically speaking, these brands use the celebrity endorsement strategy to pursue emotional objectives and to adopt a position depending on the type of user. Likewise, these findings show that they single out uniqueness as the principal celebrity characteristic, while also mainly leveraging sports values, especially competence. These values represented by sports celebrities are markedly social in nature, which implies that they enjoy a degree of public recognition that is transferred to the brand to which they lend their image.
Research limitations/implications
The conclusions connect celebrity endorsers with strategic branding issues and aspects of sports.
Originality/value
An empirical approach is followed here to study the representation of sports celebrities in the advertising of well-known brands linked to the sports world.
... Ahmed et al. [16] examined Twitter political campaigns during the 2014 Indian general election. Bodaghi et al. [17] conducted a longitudinal analysis on Olympic gold medalists on Instagram, investigating their characteristics as well as the rate of engagement they receive from their followers. Hou et al. [18] studied the engagement differences between scholars and nonscholars on Twitter. ...
This research holds significance for the fields of social media and communication studies through its comprehensive evaluation of Twitter’s quoting encouragement policy enacted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In addressing a notable gap in the literature, this study introduces a framework that assesses both the quantitative and qualitative effects of specific platform-wide policy interventions, an aspect lacking in existing research. Employing a big data approach, the analysis includes 304 million tweets from a randomly sampled cohort of 86,334 users, using a systematic framework to examine pre-, within-, and post-intervals aligned with the policy timeline. Methodologically, SARIMAX models and linear regression are applied to the time series data on tweet types within each interval, offering an examination of temporal trends. Additionally, the study characterizes short-term and long-term adopters of the policy using text and sentiment analyses on quote tweets. Results show a significant retweeting decrease and modest quoting increase during the policy, followed by a swift retweeting resurgence and quoting decline post-policy. Users with fewer connections or higher activity levels adopt quoting more. Emerging quoters prefer shorter, positive quote texts. These findings hold implications for social media policymaking, providing evidence for refining existing policies and shaping effective interventions.
... The advent of digital technologies has permeated numerous disciplines, ranging from smart cities [1] to healthcare [2,3], among others. Within this vast digital landscape, social media stands out as a prominent digital service, encompassing diverse applications such as self-presentation [4] and catalyzing significant social revolutions [5]. However, the widespread accessibility of social media platforms, coupled with their capacity to aggregate information from various sources, exposes users to a deluge of both genuine and false news on a daily basis [6,7]. ...
... (4). This equation outlines the composition of the final data frame, which consists of two key components: 'CorEntFea', encompassing the feature values of the most highly correlated entities within each feature at week 't', as established in Eq. (3). ...
This study represents an initial endeavor to harness the potential of the semantic space within the Twitter news flow to forecast financial anomalies. In pursuit of this objective, approximately two million entities we reextracted from the news text disseminated by the most widely followed news channels on Twitter. These entities were scrutinized over 12 years to explore potential correlations between their evolution and future stock market anomalies. The examination focused on the centrality measures of these entities within their daily semantic graphs, with particular emphasis on identifying the most correlated entities. Subsequently, these entities were employed to construct a logistic regression model capable of predicting the presence of future anomalies and their direction—whether indicative of an upward trajectory associated with a rise in stock prices or a downward trajectory associated with a decline in prices. The evaluation results demonstrate a remarkable level of accuracy for the prediction model, thereby holding promise for further advancements in this interdisciplinary research domain that encompasses natural language processing, complex networks, and artificial intelligence. Lastly, the findings are discussed in light of pertinent theories that furnish a robust foundation for future investigations.
... Siendo una red social destinada más al ocio que a la información (Lee et al., 2015), Instagram ofrece a las marcas una oportunidad para conectar con sus públicos (cfr. Bodaghi and Oliveira, 2022;Dhanesh et al., 2022). En esta línea, prolifera el estudio de las celebrities en Instagram (Lee et al. 2021;Lee et al., 2022;Ahmadi et al., 2023;Copeland et al., 2023;Husain et al. 2023). ...
... Esta plataforma se configura como un punto de conexión entre usuarios y ofrece interesantes oportunidades para la socialización y la generación de comunidades online (Serafinelli, 2017). Siendo una red social destinada más al ocio que a la información (Lee et al., 2015), ofrece a las marcas una oportunidad para conectar con sus públicos, pues se ha demostrado que genera altos niveles de interactividad y engagament (Bodaghi and Oliveira, 2022;Dhanesh et al., 2022) entre marcas y usuarios. En la actualidad se erige como una herramienta de comunicación imprescindible para las marcas, dada su gran penetración entre el público; de hecho, según datos de IAB Spain (2023), Instagram es la red social más usada a nivel comercial y se encuentra entre las redes más relevantes en términos de conocimiento y uso; siendo por tanto la red social a la que más inversión han destinado las marcas. ...
Enmarcado en tendencias más generales donde las marcas aprovechan la atracción de los ciudadanos por el entretenimiento, este trabajo aborda el uso de las celebridades como endorsers en publicidad, concretamente, en redes sociales. El presente estudio tiene como propósito estudiar cómo las marcas instrumentalizan los valores del deporte a partir de celebridades deportivas para enriquecer sus valores identitarios. Para ello, se realiza un análisis de discurso de los posts de Instagram más representativos publicados durante el periodo 2021-2022 por las marcas más notorias como patrocinadoras en el deporte español según el Barómetro del Patrocinio Deportivo de 2021: Coca Cola, Santander, Movistar, Iberdrola y Red Bull. Los resultados apuntan que las marcas, a excepción de Coca-Cola, hacen un uso instrumental de las diferentes categorías de valores del deporte para transferirlas a sus marcas. Estas categorías son: valores morales, valores competenciales, valores personales y valores sociales. Las conclusiones arrojan luz sobre la estrecha relación entre los valores del deporte y la semántica de las marcas. En este sentido, se fomentan valores afectivos, especialmente cuando se trata de celebridades deportivas con menor presencia en los medios masivos. Si bien los valores competenciales son muy significativos, no se observa una constante en una categoría de valor por marca.
... In this way, it will be possible for both academics and athletes to consider sportive motivation and its correct handling as a significant issue. There are studies examining the motivation of athletes to use the Instagram application in terms of gender (Weber et al., 2022) and age (Bodaghi and Oliveira, 2022). However, in the literature, the frequency of the athletes in the Instagram application, the motivation of the athletes to use the Instagram application during their educational status, and how the sports branch they are interested in motivates the athletes to use the application have not been emphasized. ...
The popularity of the Instagram application has a serious potential for brand development for athletes. Athletes gain great potential in the phase of branding when they use the Instagram application successfully. Therefore, the aim of this study was to make an adaptation of the motivation scale for athletes’ Instagram use to Turkish for understanding their motives to use Instagram and analyzing the determinants in terms of gender, age, educational status, frequency of Instagram use, type, and level of the sport. Within the research framework, a total of 208 athletes from different sports branches of sports clubs in Turkey participated in our study. Data collection was carried out via adapting the Instagram Motivation Scale developed by Sheldon and Bryant (2016) and a questionnaire was included based on the respondents ‘demographic characteristics. Apart from the validity and reliability analysis of the scale, T-Test and One-Way Variance (ANOVA) analysis were used to evaluate the collected data. According to the findings of the research, which were obtained via adapting the motivation scale for using Instagram to the context of Turkey, the scale is a valid and reliable measurement tool. Gender, age, education level, sportive branch level, and frequency of Instagram use were the factors that influenced the athletes’ motivation to use the application. This research will help athletes manage their social media brands efficiently in the future by focusing on identifying the motivations that draw the attention of athletes to the Instagram application.
... The introduction proceeds with the three main aspects of this open software which are; (1) Considering the competitive nature of rumors on social media, (2) Characterizing the spreaders based on the stance of rumor posts, (3) Extracting the macro patterns of diffusion. Finally, the uniqueness and generalizability of the software will be discussed. ...
... Nowadays, with the inclusive use of mobile computing devices [1] and the pervasiveness of social media [2], rumors are part of our daily lives whose impacts could not be dismissed. Rumor, as social psychology literature defines, is a story or a statement in general circulation without confirmation or certainty to facts [3]. ...
The Rumor Categorizer Software (RCS), an open-source software, categorizes Twitter posts based on their stance towards a given rumor into six categories; rumor tweet, anti-rumor tweet, rumor retweet, anti-rumor retweet, rumor-related tweet, and rumor-related retweet. Then for the publishers of those tweets/retweets, analyze the user dynamics. Furthermore, the software calculates the number of users belonging to any combination of the sextuple categories and plots the number of tweets/retweets in each hour for rumor and anti-rumor. The software aids researchers and practitioners in analyzing rumors effectively.
Olympic champions have been real idols for a significant portion of society, and by the advent of social media, their influence has increased rapidly. Despite their impact, they have been less studied. A primary step to grasp their cybercharacter is to examine their Instagram characteristics with possible gender differences and correlations between these characteristics. By applying a data-driven approach, this study utilizes a content analysis method to analyze photos of Olympic gold medalists on Instagram. In this vein, male gold medalists show a monotonously positive relationship between their following/follower ratio and the engagement/follower ratio. Also, the ratio of self-presentation turned out to have a solid monotonous negative relationship with age in both male and female gold medalists, which even takes a linear form in men. In line with the related theories and literature, these findings can help athletes manage and grow their brand on social media.KeywordsInstagramSelf-presentingUser characteristicsOlympicGold medalistsData mining
Introduction. The development of online marketing in social networks creates unique opportunities for personal selling. Especially these opportunities are manifested in online education when they buy a brand of an expert with experience in a particular field. That is why a competitive space is being formed in the Instagram social network, where a personal brand acts as a product or service.
Materials and methods. Studying the effectiveness of promoting a personal brand in social networks based on the Instagram platform was chosen to have great visual opportunities for self-presentation. As part of the collection of empirical material, two methods were used: a survey (N-200) and content analysis of three blogger accounts with high rates of activity and popularity.
Results and discussion. Content analysis of bloggers showed that an algorithmic feed on a social network allows bloggers to control the content. To help them, Instagram provides statistical data on user reach, thereby capturing trends in the movement of the blogger’s audience. The main task of a blogger is to combine real and “virtual” images so as not to lose consumer confidence. A survey of social network users confirmed the importance of a personal brand for them. The survey also made it possible to identify the most popular audience requests that they expect from bloggers and their accounts: valuable reviews and recommendations, case studies and author’s solutions, storytelling, blogger’s reflections and motivating messages, live broadcasts, and stories are important.
Conclusions. The results obtained underline followers’ high level of interest in the bloggers’ personal brand on Instagram. The study results show that the most significant number of those involved (those who give feedback and are constantly involved in interaction with the account) is where the formation of a personal brand is built to a greater extent on the emotional level of perception of the individual.
