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Abstract
Social communication tools (i.e., social media) have made modern-day communication faster and more convenient. Due to social media's implications for returns, companies invest heavily into strategy and content engineering (Lee, Hosanagar, & Nair, 2018). In the sport industry, social media platforms have provided opportunities for publicity and a new layer of interaction for stakeholders and fans. Over the past decade, many studies have examined social media within the professional sport industry, but no known studies have researched how National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sports teams utilize social media, specifically Facebook, for recruiting purposes. The study employs agenda setting theory in a content analysis methodological design, to examine the social networking practices of Division I women's golf teams in the United States. In examining the program's most recent 50 posts, resulting in a data set of n = 2,000, significant differences were found in mean number of likes based on post type and post theme. Regression analysis revealed hashtags significantly negatively predicted the number of comments, while chi-square analyses yielded significant findings between program ranking and post theme. The results of the study provide insight into how amateur teams use social media, and further implications are discussed.
Keywords: social media, NCAA, agenda-setting, recruiting
Introduction
Over the past few years individuals have increasingly found innovative avenues of communication that they never thought possible. A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center found that all younger adults (ages 18-34) in the study owned cellular phones, with 95% of them owning a smartphone. Anderson (2015) noted that the increase in usage of the smartphone has a significant social, political, and cultural impact and smartphone usage overall has changed the way that people share their lives, contact their friends, obtain data, and consume media. While smartphones are used for a variety of purposes, Facebook is one social media service in particular that is often used.
In the latest statistics available from Facebook, this social media service has 1.52 billion active daily users and 2.32 active monthly users (Facebook, 2019). This record-breaking number of users earns it the top spot as the most popular form of traditional social media in the United States (Perrin & Anderson, 2019) and world (Kellogg, 2019). The average person spends 143 minutes a day...