"Tweeting for Tickets:” The Role of Social Media Marketing in Sports Franchises

In recent years, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have become extremely useful marketing tools. Recent literature has shown that the use of social networks by corporations is important for building brand equity and consumer relationships. Additional research has shown that a consumer’s emotional connection to a product or brand can lead to more consistent habits from the consumer. While a general hypothesis that increased use of social media marketing by corporations will lead to higher sales is intuitive, testing this in many consumer-facing businesses is difficult because it is difficult to attribute sales from increased social media activity to a consumer’s emotional attachment to the brand. Additionally, identifying specific time windows to compare changes in social media use and sales is difficult. This study builds on the current literature by looking specifically at social media use in the world of sports, where “fandom”, an extreme form of emotional attachment, is present,
and ticket sales can be measured game-to-game, so there are clear time benchmarks between which we can analyze changes in social media activity. In particular, this paper looks to exploit these characteristics of the sports world by analyzing the Twitter activity of franchises in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The results of the analysis show significant association between game attendances and both short-term and long-term Twitter activity measures. These effects increase and remain significant when looking only at teams located in “small markets”, cities with a TV population less than 3 million. Collectively, these results suggest that social media activity is associated with sales through the construct of consumers’ emotional attachment with a brand.