ABSTRACT
Sports teams have employed different live-tweeting message strategies to compete for followers’ attention and maximize their target audience’s engagement. However, whether these strategies are successful and how they influence engagement in live-tweeting are underexplored. This study adopts a quantitative content analysis to answer these questions by examining the use of live-tweeting in baseball, basketball, and hockey games. A total of 540 live-tweets were collected from 12 sports teams in 12 games and coded for their use of different content strategies. Findings from this study suggest that different content strategies vary in their ability to affect tweet virality (i.e., number of retweets), emotional support (i.e., number of likes), and direct conversation with teams (i.e., number of replies). Still image was discovered as the only factor with a positive impact on user engagement. The use of links and mentions negatively influenced user engagement. Compared to neutral tweets, both positive and negative tweets led to more replies. In addition, positive tweets increased tweet virality and likes. This study furthers the understanding of live-tweeting in sports and provides practical implications for sports teams and organizations to adopt appropriate content strategies to communicate with followers effectively.
