How NBA teams use twitter as a brand management tool

Abstract

Social media has changed the way that organizations communicate with consumers and potential consumers. In the professional sports industry, teams use social media as a way to engage with their fans, posting a range of different types of content. The ways that professional sports teams use social media for branding purposes has been studied in a limited fashion. This study addresses that gap, analyzing the use of Twitter by the Los Angeles Lakers -- focusing on the brand attributes the team uses in their tweets (both product-related and non-product-related) and their relation to Twitter's key engagement features (retweets, favorites, replies). The results build on current knowledge of social media-based brand management in professional sports, while also offering significant insights for practitioners on how the utilization of particular brand attributes can lead to better engagement with fans of the team.