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Introduction
The growth of sponsorship as a marketing communications vehicle for a range of brands has been well documented (IEG, 2015; Reuters, 2011), with global sponsorship expenditure reaching $55.3 billion in 2014 (IEG, 2015). Arguably the most high-profile sponsorship property in sport is the Olympic Games, with the 53 London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games sponsors paying a combined $2.2 billion for the right to be associated with the event (Rogers, 2012). The lack of signage at Olympic venues pushes to the fore the importance of activating a sponsorship, over and above acquiring the sponsorship rights themselves. Simply acquiring the sponsorship rights to a property does not guarantee a return on investment and the ability of sponsorship to contribute to highly prized metrics such as brand equity is thus contingent on its activation (Ukman, 2011; Papadimitriou and Apostolopoulou, 2009). Recent years have seen considerable growth in these associated promotional activities which allow sponsors to connect with fans and consumers (O'Reilly and Lafrance Horning, 2013) and add value to the event (Skildum-Reid, 2009). Increasingly, sponsors are incorporating digital and online marketing into their sponsorship activations (Meenaghan et al. , 2013) and social media is forming a growing part of many brands' sponsorship activation strategies (Chanavat and Desbordes, 2014).
The London 2012 Olympic Games were billed as the first truly social Olympics, or Socialympics (Crow, 2012), with social media playing an important role in the way in which fans consumed and shared the Olympic experience (Miah, 2012). Indeed, the opening ceremony of London 2012 generated more tweets than did the entire Beijing 2008 Games (Frederick et al. , 2015) and overall 150 million tweets were sent about London 2012, compared with only 125,000 for Beijing 2008 (Pillai, 2012). From a sponsorship perspective, the London 2012 sponsors spent a reported 15-20 per cent of their sponsorship budgets on digital media (FoxBusiness, 2012), providing a true showcase of the use of social media in sponsorship activation (Meenaghan et al. , 2013).
A significant and growing body of literature on the use of social media in sport now exists (see Abeza et al. , 2015; Filo et al. , 2015 for comprehensive reviews of literature in this area), looking at sectors including national governing bodies (Eagleman, 2013; Thompson et al.