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University of Economics, Prague
Bachelor’s Thesis
2020 Taim Alachkar
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University of Economics, Prague Faculty of Business Administration
Study program: Bachelor of Business Administration
Title of the Bachelor´s Thesis:
Social Media Marketing on Facebook and Its Contribution to Sports Brands
Author: Taim Alachkar
Supervisor: doc. Ing. Vaclav Stříteský, Ph.D.
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1. D e c l a r a t i o n o f A u t h e n t i c i t y
I hereby declare that the Bachelor´s Thesis “Social media marketing on Facebook and its contribution to Sports Brands” presented herein is my own work, or fully and specifically acknowledged wherever adapted from
other sources. This work has not been published or submitted elsewhere for the requirement of a degree program.
In Prague, Dec 16, 2020 Signature
Taim Alachkar
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Acknowledgment
I hereby wish to express my gratitude and appreciation for the supervisor of my thesis doc. Ing.
Václav Stříteský, Ph.D. I would not have been able to conduct such research without the constant recommendations and good mentoring skills provided for me by my supervisor. I am extraordinary thankful for him for giving me the chance of working with him.
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Title of the Bachelor´s Thesis:
Social media marketing on Facebook and its contribution to major sport brands.
Abstract:
This Bachelor thesis aims to evaluate the communication strategy on Facebook followed by major sports brands. More specifically, to construct a classification for posts, and identify which categories maintained the highest level of engagement. Furthermore, to provide a comparison of the purpose for each type of posts used to communicate with followers by the chosen major brands in the industry and assess the impact of these posts on the followers of the brands. A secondary aim of this bachelor thesis is to identify how these methods are affecting international Facebook users. Two research methods were used for conducting the bachelor thesis to collect data, the core research method, was an intensive content analysis on the last 100 posts published by each brand on their main worldwide Facebook page. The second research method was a less intensive focus group, it was used to collect general points of view from 9 participants. Among the findings of the second research is that participants are educated in business universities and have a gist of the sportswear industry. Apart from these findings, there are several observations related to the topic.
These observations as well as findings from research pave the way for more extensive qualitative research of this phenomenon and gives the opportunity for the researcher to suggest recommendations for the communication of sports brands using Facebook.
Key words:
Social media marketing, Sports brands, Facebook, Content analysis, Focus Group, Brand Awareness, Brand Loyalty, Engagement level.
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Table of Contents
List of Tables ... 8
List of Figures ... 9
List of Appendices ... 10
List of Photos ... 11
Introduction ... 12
Research Aim, Objective, and Questions ... 13
Theoretical part ... 15
1. Specifics of Social Media Marketing ... 15
1.1 Social Media Marketing ... 15
1.2 Web1.0 and Web2.0 ... 16
1.3 Platforms ... 17
1.4 The Choice of Social Media Platforms ... 19
1.5 Demographic Profile of individual platforms ... 20
1.6 Benefits of Social Media Marketing ... 22
2. The most common tools used by sports brands in social media communication ... 25
2.1 Endorsements ... 25
2.2 Cooperation with non-athletic celebrities and creating hype ... 26
2.3 Sports events sponsoring and social media metrics of voice measurement... 28
3. Methodology ... 31
3.1 Content analysis approach ... 31
3.2 Focus Group approach ... 34
Practical Part ... 36
4. Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour on social media ... 36
4.1 Nike. ... 36
4.2 Adidas ... 40
4.3 Under Armour ... 43
5. Content analysis ... 47
5.1 Content analysis general findings on Facebook Accounts ... 47
5.2 Facebook content categorization... 50
5.3 Facebook content timing ... 52
5.3.1 Years ... 53
5.3.2 Days ... 54
5.3.3 Time ... 55
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5.4 Facebook media format and content classification for each brand ... 56
5.4.1 Nike ... 57
5.4.2 Adidas ... 60
5.4.3 Under Armour ... 64
5.5 Summary of content analysis ... 66
6. Focus Group ... 70
6.1 Objective One ... 70
6.2 Objective Two ... 72
6.3 Summary of Focus Group ... 75
Conclusion ... 77
References ... 80
Appendices ... 96
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List of Tables
Table 1. Variety of social media platforms for promotion business. ... 18
Table 2. Criteria used for the data extracted from the posts on Facepager ... 32
Table 3. Number of Followers top five Nike's subaccounts have (in Millions). ... 37
Table 4. Number of Followers five Nike's athletes possess and its effect on their salary (in Millions). ... 38
Table 5. Number of Followers top five Adidas' subaccounts have (in millions). ... 41
Table 6. Number of Followers four Adidas’ athletes possess and its effect on their salary (in millions). ... 41
Table 7. Number of Followers top five Under Armour's subaccounts have (in Millions). ... 43
Table 8. Number of Followers five Under Armour’s athletes possess and its effect on their salary (in millions). ... 44
Table 9. Facebook's general findings for these brands ... 50
Table 10. Posts categories and types of categories classification. ... 51
Table 11. Each years' number of posts ... 53
Table 12. Each day’s number of posts. ... 54
Table 13. Time distribution of posts by Hours ... 55
Table 14. Content category distribution of Nike. ... 58
Table 15. Content category distribution for Adidas ... 61
Table 16.Content category distribution for Under Armour ... 64
Table 17. Total engagements and number of posts per brand and category. ... 68
Table 18. Participant ranking most to least important categories in their point of view. ... 72
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List of Figures
Figure 1.Comparison of the usage of the World Wide Web in 1996 and 2012. ... 17
Figure 2.Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2020, Ranked by number of active users (in millions) ... 19
Figure 3. Age demographics of social media usage. ... 21
Figure 4. Gender Demographics of social media usage ... 22
Figure 5. Show the Gender of Reddit users which is big blogging platform... 22
Figure 6. Brand value of the leading 10 apparel brands worldwide in 2020 ... 26
Figure 7. Distribution of Media format... 57
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List of Appendices
Appendix 1.Nike's Likes, Comments, and Shares percent distribution by category (In %). ... 96
Appendix 2.Nike's Reactions (emotions) percent distribution by category (In %) ... 96
Appendix 3. Adidas' Likes, Comments, and Shares percent distribution by category (In %) ... 98
Appendix 4. Adidas' reactions (emotions) percent distribution by category (In %). ... 98
Appendix 5. Under Armour's Likes, Comments, and Shares percent distribution by category (In %). ... 100
Appendix 6. Under Armour's reactions (emotions) percent distribution by category (In %) ... 101
Appendix 7 Questions used in Focus Group... 102
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List of Photos
Photo 1. Cristiano Ronaldo presenting Nike products on Instagram ... 39 Photo 2. Team Nike supporting clients. ... 40 Photo 3.postpaid partnership between adidas football and Messi showing his shoes Nemeziz. .. 42 Photo 4. The Rock promoting his UA collection through his personal Instagram account. ... 45 Photo 5. Under Armour’s unique promoting method on Instagram ... 46 Photo 6.The three brands' main pages on Facebook. ... 49
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Introduction
Day by day, social media have become more popular, social media has rotated the method in which communication is held. It was able to create an authentic virtual connection between people, businesses, and continents at large. The two-way communication formation of social media aids organizations to communicate with potential customers and exposes the brands to those who are not as close to it. Companies can grow their revenues, modify their scheme, or even grow their credibility with two-way communication structure by engaging in communication, sharing news and trends used by them, and publishing other factors of expected content from their followers.
Engagement with costumers on social media could have multiple aims and objectives, and not only increasing profits and sales. It is not argued that increasing profits is a bad thing, but companies aim for deeper focuses from social media such as increase traffic to their websites, gain the attention of potential customers, brand building, brand awareness, or brand loyalty. These strategies can be enlarged for sports brands as social media platforms are the perfect place for creating the hype, illustrating the products, and motivating individuals to participate in sport activities because this leads for regular people to buy their products. Yielding from all these objectives, most sport brands that observe the effect of social media change their organizational structure to include a team that manages and spends time on developing the social media accounts.
When it comes to sports brands, the number of firms is as high as the number of buyers in the market and the low cost of switching to various alternatives gives the customers high bargaining power. In addition, to how aware the customers are currently to which product they buy, they most likely prefer to inform themselves online before making the purchase thus the emergence of e-commerce and online shopping has helped enhancing the accessibility and intimacy among consumers. That is the reason for the brands to constantly engage and compete to maintain a better brand image to stop their costumer from buying and shopping at alternative brands (Surowiecki, 2014). Brand loyalty plays a huge role in this approach too (Surowiecki, 2014). Firms need to continuously promote their products and make sure it is differentiated from their competitors.
This thesis mainly elaborated on the activities of the sporting goods industry on Facebook social media platform for multiple reasons. The first reason is that the sportswear industry market is one of the most important and largest industries in the economy according to its market size (176.25 billion U.S. dollars) and is estimated to reach (248.1 billion U.S. dollars) by 2026 (Shahbandeh, 2020). The second reason is that internet and social media is mainly used by Millennials, the generation from 1980 to 2000 aged between 20 and 40 (Suntinger,2018) and generation Z (Bussineswire,2020). At the same time sports is practiced by the same age demographics and sportswear is mainly consumed by the same age demographics of people even if they do not play sports. (Kunst, 2020). Additionally, most studies detected on the literature review concerning social media motivation for sport brands were descriptive and most of the
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research focused on how general campaigns, products, and innovations are revealed. In other words, the literature reviews lacked a research that analyzed the sports brands activities on social media or on any social media platform. This thesis will provide an intensive analysis by choosing a platform and conducting a primary research which explores the most attractive posts for followers, the reason for having more followers, and the number of reactions on each type of posts whether the post is about a story, advertisement, news, promotional videos, etc.
Research Aim, Objective, and Questions
The bachelor thesis builds on the knowledge that vast majority of brands are using social media for marketing purposes to increase brand awareness, brand loyalty, promote their products, inform customers about important news related to the brand, and highlight sponsorships of celebrities. Hence this paper intends to find out what sport brands publish on the largest social media platform in number of users which is Facebook (Statista, 2020). To Understand which posts are more important according to the level of engagement. Following questions are set as guidelines to fulfil this aim.
1. What is the classification of posts, and posting habits used by major sports brands on Facebook and which categories form the classification are more popular for sportswear followers on Facebook according to the allocation of reactions for each type of posts?
2. What are the expectations from sports brands in the case of an educated group of people in the field of business and marketing, that are interested in sports brands?
The overall goal of this bachelor thesis is to identify the posting habits and the classification of posts of major sports brands on Facebook for their worldwide pages. More specifically, the thesis finds out if specific type of posts leads to more level of engagement than other categories among the classification of posts with providing reasons for that. In addition, to providing a comparison with other type of posts that did not yield the same levels of engagements as the popular posts with evaluating the purpose of these posts. Furthermore, the thesis assesses how each brand differentiates with its posts on Facebook to identify relevancy of the communication strategy and recommend what is missing from each brand to compete in a healthy way. Lastly, the research focuses on analyzing the reactions of each category of posts (love, ha-ha, wow, sad, and angry) to identify the emotions carried for each type of publishments.
Secondary purpose of this research is to identify the expectations, activities, and the effect of Facebook posts on international Facebook users. In addition, to utilize on their experience from being students in business and economics faculties by deriving recommendations for sports brand from them.
The thesis selected to analyze the three companies (Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour) on Facebook. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the selected sport brands’ activities on Facebook
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through conducting an intensive content analysis as will be visible in Chapter 5. The results from the content analysis, yielded from exploring the posting habits and the most popular categories of content which were discovered through categorizing the content and allocating the number of reactions, each category or type maintained from the fans of the page. As a result, from the content analysis, recommendations were provided for the selected companies to improve their Facebook strategy and to learn from competitors operating in more effective way in section 5.5 (summary of content analysis). To dodge the limitations of the content analysis, which was not being able to explore each comment by the followers of the pages, because the number of comments for the chosen three sports brands were large. A Focus group was conducted as a second research method in Chapter 6, the focus group included participants interested in sports, that follow at least one of the three chosen brands on Facebook. In addition to the fact, that the participants are all educated in business universities and have a diverse background. The goal of the Focus group was to test their expectations from sports brands on social media which includes Facebook and explore how credible costumer reactions are for them. Finally, the focus group tested how the respondents view the strategies and the classifications of categories followed by these brands on Facebook. The categories were explained for them and then the participants rated the categories from most to least important in addition to providing recommendations for content that was lacking from the pages.
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Theoretical part
1. Specifics of Social Media Marketing
This chapter is the first one to cover the literature review and the main specifics and features that have already been collected and that also relate to the agenda of this Bachelor Thesis. It will start by introducing the concept of Social Media Marketing, followed by the evolution if this field.
In other words, how did we get to capitalizing on such platforms because of the evolution of the World Wide Web. After elaborating on the history, the Chapter will discuss the main important (must know) platforms, while mentioning a small example on how the Sportswear brands leverage on these platforms to keep up with the topic. Continuously, after discussing the platforms the chapter will discuss how companies choose a platform for each type of posts followed by the age, and gender of the demographics of individual platforms and the chapter will end with detailing the main important benefits if connecting brands to social media.
1.1 Social Media Marketing
Marketing strategy is the set of implementations for creating establishing a relationship with the clients to “exchange offerings that have value for the costumers, client’s partners, and society at large” (Varadarajan, 2009). In other words, businesses introduce the public to products or services that they leverage on through the function called marketing. It has never been only about the product and if a company has no marketing strategy, whether it follows the traditional marketing strategy or the modern marketing strategy it is difficult to maintain a customer base, create and awareness of their brands, influence costumers’ attitude, receive feedback to help improve current products and services and raise their brand equity. (Varadarajan, 2009).
The most modern way of marketing and the one that is currently free and effective and is a great method of spreading awareness about the company to a big audience across most parts of the world is Social Media Marketing (Bush, 2016). Whether the limitations of traditional methods such as TV, newspapers, and magazines are being expensive or covering a limited targeted market;
it is not an issue anymore since SMM has a sizeable effect on the marketing companies and it revolutionized marketing operations all over the world. It broke the geographical restrictions because the internet, social media, mobile apps, and other digital communications technologies have become part of everyday life for billions of people around the world. For one thing, 4.57 billion people are active internet users, encompassing 59% of the global population (Statista, 2020).
It is worth mentioning, that SMM is a sensitive matter for organizations. Since it is viral and connects an enormous amount of people together. Increasing moment criticisms from shoppers has never been simpler than now for brands either. Brands can watch if the most recent item that they are showcasing via social media is getting commended or then again scrutinized. The measure
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of positive and negative response towards the message of the brand can likewise be arranged and a slid theory can be produced. Winning on the platforms takes the enterprise very high and it helps with gaining a blustering reputation and positive reviews but losing or having a scandalous product with negative references and not being able to adapt with these references through responding in the right way with developing and working harder could lead the business to collapse and losing even its most loyal customers. After all social media brings the world together and makes it small, this means that there is no space for mistakes. This is the era of information, customers are responding to every little detail through social media, blogs, etc. It was mentioned that through these platforms “costumers are beating marketers in their game” and every little e-WOM directly impacts on a business in a negative or a positive tendency (Nadda, Vipin & Dadwal, Sumesh &
Firdous, A., 2015, p.362).
1.2 Web1.0 and Web2.0
It is worthy to mention the evolution of the World Wide Web briefly to get a hold of an insight about the purpose of this paper. In the very beginning before the occurrence of the revolutionary tool called social media. World wide web has emerged into household during the 90’s. At that time websites were not user friendly and were quite a complication, each website was not more of a navigational tool. Users could find information delivered by a single party and they could only receive but nothing goes back in return. This is the reason why it was used by few;
most Web pages were presented in style not very distinguishable than how the information would be presented on a printed page. Statistics show that during 1996 the internet was used mostly in the United States, 66% of internet usage was in the United States and 34% of it was used by the rest of the world as showed in figure 1 (Richter, 2013). Not to mention that the population of the United States at that time was 296.7 million out of 5.79 billion today (U.S. Bureau of the census, 1996).
Furthermore, the internet was initially made to be revolutionized and improved; the public could always impose improvements and participate in the benefit of their businesses and their own good. In fact, the second step the World Wide Web has taken with making people’s lives easier is when at once people started interacting with the business and asking questions and get responses and even making purchases all through the internet. Amazon and AliExpress is an example of how the internet switched from navigational into transactional tool and it increased the demand for the internet. It got the support to evolve with the introduction of cable modems and high-speed internet connections, the user base has started to make progress and expand even more. Due to, the websites that provided transactional forms, it was not a surprise that people demanded a social community online and blogs started merging.
After blogs launched to the internet, information then could be delivered in a two-way conversation. The new generation of Web was born, and the internet became known as Web 2.0 or the social Web. Blogging application were user friendly and did not require too many skills for
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entry. Posting tangible information became as easy as it gets, and the more people joined the social web conversation; anyone was welcome for the participation and the group kept on growing.
Correspondingly, the World Wide Web became Global in 2012, statistics display that in this year not only the U.S was using the internet anymore. 87% of internet usage came from the rest of the world and only 13% of the usage was conducted in the United States as showed in figure1 (Richter, 2013). Additionally, businesses took notice of how valid these types of connections are. Even, authorities used to publish information and use it as an additional implementation of their campaigns. The most recent expansion of Web 2.0 were sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter;
these websites made the world smaller and more entertaining to connect with people from your community, school, work, etc. (Gunelius, 2011, p. 6). In fact, as of the second quarter of the year 2020, 2.7 billion active users have logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days from the date of publishing the article which was the 10th of August 2020 (Statista.com).
Figure 1.Comparison of the usage of the World Wide Web in 1996 and 2012
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Source: Richter, F. (October16,2013). The World Wide Web is now Truly Global [Digital Image]
1.3 Platforms
Nowadays social media is changing rapidly, high number of new trends are available.
Social media revolution is quick because the barriers of entry are not complicated and joining the community does not require a massive amount of experience. People always discover new methods of handling social networks and technological side services (by adding new characteristics and facilities). An example of side services could be the Facebook marketplace. Facebook marketplace did not exist at the time Facebook platform was just a portal of posting pictures and sharing experiences with family and friends. To elaborate more, users can buy and sell products or secondhand possessions through Facebook marketplace (Facebook help, 2020). Moreover, if we compare Web 2.0 to some other industries, we find out that most industries remained the same and
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improved and developed heavily overtime, while the World Wide Web changed dramatically just in two decades as mentioned previously in the paper. “Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communications techniques, social media has substantially changed the way organizations, communities and individuals communicate and takes on different forms (Baruah, 2015, p.2).
Table 1 Demonstrates the most common forms of social media which are used in businesses, since this paper is more concerned on sporting goods the table will demonstrate the platforms that are mostly used by sports brands and with mentioning an example of each use.
Table 1. Variety of social media platforms for promotion business.
Platform: Main Features: Biggest platform in the trend: Small Example of usage in sporting goods industry:
Social networking sites:
Facebook, WhatsApp, google plus, café mom, gather, Fitsugar, Myspace.
Allows users to connect and share with people who have similar interest and backgrounds
Facebook is the Largest social networking site, first to surpass the landmark of 1 billion users.
(Richter, 2019)
Adidas has 37 million follows on Facebook, the brand uses the platform to presents products with adding links for purchasing.
Micro-blogging sites:
Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous
Allow the users to submit short written entries, which can include links to product and service sites, as well as links to other social media sites
Twitter is the Largest micro blogging site, with 5.787 tweets per second. (Lin, 2019)
Nike’s campaign “dream crazier”
which focused on women empowerment. Nike’s 1-minute video about women’s World cup generated 22.4 million views.
Video sharing sites:
YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler
Allow users to share different types of media, such as pictures and videos.
YouTube is the largest, most popular video hosting platform and the 2nd largest search engine after google. (Huber,2018)
During the Corona pandemic lockdown Nike launched 35 mins home workout on YouTube, presenting their products in the backgrounds (equipped by trainer), each video got between a 1-1.5 million views. People were supper satisfied on comments.
Photo sharing sites:
Instagram, Flicker, Pinterest, Snapchat
Enable users to upload, transform, edit, publish, and share pictures and videos, etc.
Instagram is the second most downloaded app in the Apple store. It has 1 billion MAUs (Newberry,2019)
Sports brands post photo editing that has a clear motivational tone of voice, through the people that make brands it is the athletes that they partner with (Endorsements).
Professional networking sites:
LinkedIn, Job case Xing, bark, Glassdoor
An expert system administration that is centered exclusively around
associations and
connections of a business nature as opposed to including individual, nonbusiness collaborations.
LinkedIn has more than 690 million active users September (Linkdln,2019) and it was voted the most trusted network (Schomer, 2019)
Nike, adidas, etc. in fact, all successful brands post job opportunities on these websites in addition to updates on work ethics for example: community stores information, office style and shows public on the inside of the business
Social News Websites:
Reddit, Product hunt, Slashdot, Quora
A form where content is socially curated and promoted by site members through voting
Reddit receives 21 billion monthly screen views and has 430 million MAUs. (Reddit.inc,2019)
Encourage social interactive communications about the brand, like adidas campaign on fighting fake products.
Source: Author
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As such, social media can be depicted as an assortment of programming based computerized innovations-typically introduced as applications and sites-that give clients advanced conditions in which they can send and get advanced substance or data over online informal organization (Appel, Grewal, Hadi, and Stephen, 2019).
As it is obvious on the diagram, Facebook is the most famous platform (Statista, 2020) and the crucial chances of this stage are:
A. can make a profile uncovering data about themselves.
B. can post text, photographs and media which is imparted to whatever other clients that have consented to be their "companion",
C. utilize different inserted applications, join normal premium gatherings, D. purchase and sell things or administrations on Marketplace,
E. get notices of their Facebook companions' exercises and exercises of Facebook pages they follow ('Facebook', 2020).
Figure 2.Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2020, Ranked by number of active users (in Millions)
Source: (Statista,2020)
1.4 The Choice of Social Media Platforms
Companies interact through social media using numerous online platforms for social media marketing, such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. The decision of platform relies upon promoting procedures and target consumers.
According to an analysis done by Tafasse and Wien (2018) around multiple strategies imposed by companies where the experience and how the brand shows itself on social media presents desirable psychological characteristics; informational- presents the actual product. The
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other type is service information and interactional – where social media promoting implants fluid interactions with costumers and message strategy to perform a relationship with the costumer.
Another research did the job of breaking down which sites are more convenient for informative strategy and which are more suitable for the method of interreacting. Twitter was more reliable for informative plea. The discoveries featured that Facebook worked better for interactive posts and that Instagram was more reasonable for interactive joining informative diversion offers (Kusumasondajaja, 2018). Livestreaming positioned designing proved to be more authentic in the eyes of buyers than pre-recorded videos by increasing searching and subscription intention (Ang, Wei & Anaza,2018); here when it comes the time to use the platform YouTube, Twitch, and Mixer;
which proved to be the most used live-streaming website and it is the biggest competitor to the T.V (Streamer magazine, 2020).
1.5 Demographic Profile of individual platforms
Online media advertising is the advanced method of speaking with costumers, it sounds basic and should be possible by anybody. On the contrary, it is true that SMM is a uniquely beneficial tool for marketers, however it ought to be done in the correct manner. For example, Social Media is building up each day, and as referenced before patterns are developing quick and consistently some new patterns that are never known about would rise. For instance, Instagram's most well-known component (Instagram stories) was propelled 6 years after the creation and distributing of the application for general society; a few people post stories consistently and the numbers state that 500 million Instagrammers use stories day by day (Gotter, 2020). Considering, Marketers ought to have the option to stay aware of the steam of web-based media on the grounds that it is a significant key to targeting a larger magnitude. Therefore, every type of trend is preferred more by a gender over the other, age also plays a huge role with choosing the platform that a company is going to elaborate on. The next part of this paper will bring numbers and facts that prove this theory.
A. Age
A fascinating reality is that every online media platform is desirable over a section with regards to demographics. Large brands frequently have items and exciting items for all ages however cannot present it to these assorted costumers on one stage. Investigates ought to have a look at the way that a few platforms are more favored by youth and some different stages are utilized by the older ages. Figure 3 gives us a viewpoint to see how age segment decent variety ought to be followed and watched while it shows what platforms are utilized more by what ages.
21 Figure 3. Age demographics of social media usage.
Source: ComScore, (Business Insider,2015).
Chen, furthermore, Lee (2018) explored the utilization of Snapchat for online media promoting while at the same time focusing on youthful customers. The examination discoveries featured that Snapchat is considered as the most close, easygoing, and dynamic stage furnishing clients with data, socialization, and diversion. The investigation recognized that youthful customers appear to have an inspirational mentality towards Snapchat causing comparable sentiments toward buy aim and brands publicized on the stage. In the case of Facebook, it is observed from figure 3, that it contains a fair median of the age distribution.
B. Gender
People for the most part have various preferences, aversions, needs, and manners of thinking. For example, hardly any men apply cosmetics, and most ladies do not wear boxers.
Additionally, ladies normally do the greater part of the family shopping for food and are almost certain than men to give to charitable causes. These are on the whole key variables to consider while creating a campaign. Figure 4 and 5 illustrates which genders use the most important social media applications.
22 Figure 4. Gender Demographics of social media usage
Source: Statista 2020
Figure 5. Show the Gender of Reddit users which is big blogging platform.
Source: Author by (Pew Research Center, n.d.) 1.6 Benefits of Social Media Marketing
Social media is a way of interreacting with the outside world through devices and on point.
Whether you are at home, work or in a cafeteria. Businesses and marketers took advantages of these wide ranged e-communities. Although there is a discernment out there that social media advertising is a withering craze, measurements tend to disagree. From a marketing perspective According to HubSpot 89% of marketers admit web 0.2 marketing is beneficial to their overall social media strategy (Charmicheal, 2019). While 65% of marketers have signed to increase their social media marketing budget in the year of 2019 and 73% of marketers have revealed online
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
male female
Reddit Users: Under 50 years old
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media showcasing as being viable for their business (Charmicheal, 2019). The upcoming part of this chapter will point out certain benefits that companies will experience by using social media marketing. Some of them include:
A. Increased Brand and product recognition
Having a social media account expands the perceivability of the brand. It makes the brand more open to its clients. For Example: 71% of customers with positive communication with a brand via social media are probably going to prescribe the brand to loved ones (Lyfemarketing, 2019). If a brand or a product is using Facebook to market itself, you may be reaching 91% of them (PewReasearchCenter, 2019). The traditional method of consumer behavior when it comes to having the urge to shop for a missing part and putting on some clothes and exposing one’s self to the public to find the necessity is also extended in an online version. For instance, 54% of consumers browse the Web 0.2 to fetch new products (Beer, 2018). Not only that, 60% of Instagram users have announced that they learn about fresh released products through the platform.
(Instagram, 2019). After companies learned and had a view about these numbers and statistics in the last decade, they took the measurements of launching new products on social media platforms.
Statistics say that 66% of enterprises launch new products through Web 0.2 (DukeUniversity, 2019).
B. Improve brand loyalty
When clients draw in with a brand more oftentimes, it will in general increment their steadfastness for that specific brand” Purchasers state informing organizations online through web- based media pages causes them to feel surer about a brand (Facebook, 2019)”. Two-way correspondence is significant or a brand to prevail in this computerized age” Commitment with shoppers and giving client support is an enormous advantage. The best three reasons individuals draw in with brands via web-based media are to pose an inquiry, express an issue with an item, or acclaim an item. (Sprout Social, 2018)”. Social media gives organizations a stage to talk legitimately with customers. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are perfect representations where organizations are exceeding expectations at this methodology of building up a consistent progression of correspondence.
C. Influence the purchase decision
After introducing the concept of marketing and utilizing on the fact that it helps with driving the product and brand to go viral. Marketers also realized that it also affects the purchase decision positively. Since platforms are super user friendly and you can add the link to purchase the product immediately from the SM platform; numbers showed that 76% percent of costumers have purchased a product thy have seen on a social media platform (Charmicheal, 2019). While 52% of respondent on a survey said they are interested in purchasing a product found on Facebook, 22% on Pinterest, 18% on Instagram and 17% on twitter (Clement, 2018). From these results, it is obvious that Facebook is the most credible for customers among social media platforms. An even
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when a customer is interested in a brand and follows it on a social media platform there is a 44%
chance for him/her to buy the item through the social media brand’s post (Charmicheal, 2019).
D. Decrease marketing costs through SEO
Websites are appearing more on the regular search engines through algorithms.
Unfortunately, a significant amount of people is not quite familiar with the term SEO (Search engine optimization). Search engines' aim is to confirm the best quality search for users. The number one aim for an online retailer or an entrepreneur is supposed to be to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results (Moz.inc, 2020). A study reported by Social media examiner shows that 84% of marketers found that sufficient 6 hours of effort per week for brands on social media is beneficial to generate increased traffic. “Facebook and Twitter and other platforms' pages are dealt with like some other pages in the web record so if something happens on Twitter or happens on Facebook and we're ready to slither it, at that point we can restore that in our query items” (Blue corona, 2017). Despite, the push strategies that brands take on social media which are paid advertising to promote the brand’s identity through tweets and Facebook posts to enforce them to appear on the top of the newsfeed of its users. These means of marketing are significantly cheaper compared to other forms of marketing.
E. e-WOM
Electronic word of mouth is described as all casual correspondence that is gotten to on the web and concerning organizations, administrations, or items thereof (Litvin, Goldsmith, Pan 2008). The distinction from regular WOM is online accessibility and user anonymity. Even though, consumers would rather the traditional WOM because they know who they are talking to. Numbers show that 70 % of people trust anonymous peer reviews online but 93% of consumers trust information, related to a product or service, from a person they know (Nielsen, 2012). Here comes the important role of social media since recently the term Social e-WOM was introduced. (Jaakko Pihlaja, Hannu Saarijärvi, Mark T. Spence &Mika Yrjölä) thanks to the appearance of social media platforms which helped consumers recommend they are connections, friends, and family about a product through comments, tags, etc.
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2. The most common tools used by sports brands in social media communication
Such as any other opportunity for businesses and worldwide brands, Social media
provides tools to be used in the sphere of digitalization. It is all about who has the most followers and amount of reach. Creating authenticity through sponsorships was even a trend during the days of traditional marketing, it extended with the increased popularity of social media by measuring who has more followers and who could spread the brand visibility wider. This is a whole new competition between brands and the more influencers a brand endorses the more recognition it gets. Weather these influencers were athletes or artists they provide importance and a n integral part for the brand.
2.1 Endorsements
In this era of digitalization, it is beneficial for brands to promote themselves in the right way. Adding a story to the product is an integral option while it raises the chances of the brand’s products being sold and loved by the customers. Imagine the Jordan footwear came out as regular shoes, branded by Nike or Adidas only, it would have been sold and most probably it would be able to record a high number of profits, but only connecting it with a legend like Michael Jordan allowed the brand to generate 3.1$ Billions in the sale as mentioned in Nike’s 2019 fiscal year which is double the number of Nike Basketball’s sales which recorded 1.5$ billion on the 2019 fiscal years. (Nike.inc, 2019). As detailed in “The Last Dance”, (a documentary series made about the life of Michal Jordan) Jordan signed with Nike despite preferring its top rival, Adidas. Unlike Adidas, Nike was willing to give him his own signature shoes even though he just entered the NBA league (Barrabi, 2020). This shows how brands compete over acquiring athletes and how they specify some time to study the potential of the athletes and include risks with the process of signing some of them, as Nike knew Jordan is about to be a star from the first year, he entered the National Basketball America.
Even though nowadays, being a competitive athlete and scoring high results for the team is not enough for sportsmen to attract global brands. Athletes need to establish a presence on social media to attract endorsements and not only self-promotion. Social media in this case serves as a measurement for each athlete’s fanbase. According to these numbers’ athletes can maintain endorsements from multiple worldwide brands, it was realized while investigating salaries of players with a similar number of followers. In fact, close numbers of followers were discovered to have similar endorsement salaries. For example, Paul Pogba has 41.7 Million Followers on Instagram (Instagram,2020), while Gareth bale has 43.1 Million followers (Instagram,2020), both players are well known talented athletes that contribute a sum of significant effort to their team.
According to the highest-paid endorsement’s soccer player worldwide in the 2020 Statista graph, Pogba gets 6 Million U.S. Dollars in endorsements while Gareth Bale also gets up to 6 Million U.S. dollars just from endorsements salary (Forbes,2020). If we investigate another player’s
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Instagram profile with a higher number of followers or lower, we see that the salary varies in this case. For instance, Robert Lewandowsky’s contribution as a striker for Bayern Munich is like no other, the polish forward is currently in a good form, scoring 54 goals in just 44 games across all competitions in 2019/2020. He is really being labeled as the “best striker in the world”
(Ryan,2020). If you have a glance at the strikers’ followers on Instagram you get to discover that the strikers possess only 21.2M followers (Instagram 2020), which according to the same Statista graph gives him the opportunity to score 4 Million U.S. dollars in endorsements salaries (Forbes,2020). This was just an explanation of how big brands measure the amount of reach of their product through endorsing a player, the research that will be done in the practical part will contain measures and numbers for the purpose of investing the most paid athletes and the number of their followers on each significant platform.
2.2 Cooperation with non-athletic celebrities and creating hype
Sportswear clothes in the last 3 decades shifted the dress code with appearance of sneaker culture, there has been a fundamental shift in men’s fashion and comfort got to be the new form of being dressed. It is only about time societies will stop “calling it sportswear and just call it fashion or clothes” (Miller,2018). Figure 5 shows the value of the leading 10 apparel brands worldwide in 2020. It illustrates how fashion brands are surprised by “sportswear brands”. While the high street behemoths Zara comes in the second place after Nike, and Uniqlo and the well- known Swedish brands H&M drops below adidas in sales.
Figure 6. Brand value of the leading 10 apparel brands worldwide in 2020
Source: (Statista, 2020).
What raised the demand for sportswear and exceled the trend for it to be high fashion is a long-term circulation. From social change, urban acclimation, and hip-hop culture; sporting brands
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that are not connected with a celebrity admitted that they lack the kind of ‘cool’ factor associated with the type of marketing of creating hype, increasing sales and authenticity for forcing high prices on the products. “The CEO of the emerging American brands Under Amour admitted that this type of adaption was absent comparing with its main competitors in 2017” (Guyot, 2017). In the mid-1970s, the credits of revolutionizing styles such as promoting the stretchy tracksuit into daily life fashion go to the famous actor Bruce Lee. Out of nowhere it was cool to wear athletic tracksuits in polyester, cotton, terrycloth, and velour for activities that were not even distantly athletic. This applies to more than one style immerging from strictly sports to high fashion, such as the perennial sneaker style, the yoga pants escaping the studio and the puffer jacket getting urban (Kenworthy,2015).
Last decade sponsoring celebrities, popstars and artists became more integral for brands to establish relevant partnership to their audience and increase sales. Each brand has a segment of costumer that the focus goes to more in the process of targeting. For instance, Puma, was always supportive to women and to the African American community specially after Tommie Smith won the Olympic gold 200 m 1968 in Mexico and preformed the black power salute, because of the African American mistreatment at that moment and then Smith left his pair of Puma shoes for the world to see (Sneakerflies, n.d.). It makes the most sense for a brand with this type of reputation to collaborate with a loved celebrity that empowers women with her songs or art and is connected to the African American community. The well-known loved singer, Rihanna is loved by many and has been an inspiration for women all around the world, and women identify themselves by her.
By interfacing with Rihanna, Puma made an immediate association with a bigger female crowd and passed on the vocalist's positive association with fans to the brand. In the last quarter of 2015, Puma's income expanded by 17% (Worldfootwear,2017).
These types of collaborations are published and extended through multiple social media platforms most celebrities already have die-hard fans and they pledge their love through following on twitter, Facebook, etc. Not to mention that singers and popstars, already have a huge advantage of a presence on audio streaming social media platforms such as Spotify, Apple music, SoundCloud, etc. Audio social media platforms help artists post their work and music for the public and then they gain some amount of streaming and listeners and then the public can socialize on these platforms by watching what their friends are listening to and even follow their friend’s playlists to have it instantly on their profile and updates automatically with every update the owner of the playlist implement. Spotify with its 217 million monthly active users worldwide, obviously provides the brands with good reasons to expand their awareness through it with the help of artist and influencer collaborations, brands are seizing new opportunities within music by partnering with artists who have strong presence on Spotify (Gilliland,2019). To go back to the case of Puma, Rihanna has 39,045,390 monthly listeners on Spotify (Rihhana,2020), which gave puma the confidence in investing in her and sponsoring her to collaborate a product under her name.
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The collaboration of adidas with the well-known hip-hop artist Kanye West producing the Kanye west’s signature “Yeezy” was one of the most fruitful collaborations in the field of sportswear and sponsoring hip-hop artist. Kanye West is one of the most popular rappers of his generation, with 32,152,194 monthly listeners on Spotify (Kanye,2020) and 31 million followers on Twitter, the rapper could hype up the product and sell it for really high prices while its price varies between 910-1570 U.S. Dollars depending on the edition (Solecollector,2019). Despite the Nike’s Yeezy that Kanye abounded in 2014 because as he said, “he felt frustrated with the company which treated him like just another celebrity dabbler” (Meza,2019). After this deal, the rapper could recover after being in debt for 53 million U.S. Dollars to having a net worth of 1.3 billion U.S Dollars, Thanks to Kanye West’s brand name and the hype he created on social media, tweeting about each edition through his personal page and “Yeezy Mafia” which is a page created for this specific portfolio on each social media platform, he could bring up the sales for Adidas.
Bank of America crop valued the sneaker aside of other adidas products at 3 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, according to a document reviewed by Bloomberg. That was before the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the fashion industry (Alexander & Bhasin, 2020). He also took it to another level with mentioning his brand Yeezy in multiple of his songs such as his song “Facts” from his album The Life of Pablo that is streamed on audio streaming platforms such as Spotify. In addition to paying other celebrities that have the presence on Spotify, apple music, etc. To mention his Yeezy, which is a tactic followed by multiple brands like Nike, Gucci and other brands that use hip-hop and social media to create hype.
2.3 Sports events sponsoring and social media metrics of voice measurement
Sports sponsorship has been known to exist for a significant amount of time between humans. The difference now is that it extended from events done in the ancient Greece and Roman empire such as Olympics, gladiator fights, and chariot races. The sponsoring objectives at these times were to show off the city’s reputation and standing (Schwarz, 2008). Later, one of the advancements that occurred during the 20s century concerning sponsoring was sponsoring clubs and athletes during the events. Mainly, by providing them with free sportswear to present while participating in the action. A classic success sponsoring story would be when Adi Dazzler the creator of Adidas convinced the sprinter Jesse Ownness to use the free provisions of spikes by Adidas and then he ended up with (four gold medals). This type of sponsoring resulted in adding authenticity to the brand and Adidas acquired placement credibility from the eyes of the public (FreshBusinessThinking,2011). It is beyond argument that sports events continue to lure a huge number of people to Stadiums, digital advancements and social media development have imposed new measurements and potential to brands to increase their visibility and improve their branding message. In this subchapter, the paper will elaborate on the ongoing changes using the case of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup (WWC) held in France. As mentioned before sports events have the advantage of diehard fans, if a sports event would be compared with some other type of events it was realized by an Australian study that 8.5 percent of the performing arts audience would attend six or more events a year. In comparison, sports events attendee’s percentage of participating
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physically I the event is 22.2 percent on average and 33.3 percent when it comes to soccer only (Vincent,2020). Social media communication is usually free of charge and brands can always find the platform to participate in their name in an event with simply publishing a post that supports their athletes, or a team that they sponsor. We can learn allot from Nike’s strategy during the WWC 2019, without even paying the fee and being an official sponsor of the event and allowing their competitor Adidas to display its logo on the official ball, in stadiums, and during T.V advertisements. In February 2019, Nike published on YouTube and Instagram a Short 1 min video clip 4 month prior to the Women World Cup, called “Dream Crazier” with the description
“#Justdoit”. Narrated by the female tennis player Serena Williams. With the cause of mentioning how people call women crazy when they pursue their athletic dreams, the video goes on with the accomplishment female athletes could endorse, ends with encouraging women to fulfill their dreams. This was Nike’s first message to support gender equality and it was flipped over the internet and especially during the 2019 WWC. Nike without even being a part of the official sponsors, delivered a message to the whole world about its support to gender equity and reached fans because the video was well received. It reached 10 Million views the video streaming platform (YouTube) and could surprisingly get more than 19 Million views on Instagram, while 3.7 million liked the video and 70.000 commented and communicated with Nike Through it, making it one of the most engaging post in 2019 (Vincent,2020). Even though, as mentioned before Nike was not an official sponsor of the event just by making its athletes and teams publishing posts and other supportive campaigns, it could record the highest share of voice when it came to the 2019’s event with a percentage of 47.7 share of voice (Vincent,2020). To go back to the official sponsors, Adidas was the only sports brand amongst them, all brands posted on social media to generate engagement and reach their audience. In total Adidas posted 453 posts respectively between 1 February and 31 August via their different social media accounts comes second after their fellow sponsors (non-sport) company Visa which posted 963 posts in total (Vincent,2020). Adidas achieved a huge success in reach with 2 million reach per content in total comes second after its other sponsor competitor Coca-Cola which achieved 11 million reach per content. Adidas probably could not dominate with reaching the audience but the advantage it has of being a sports brand gave it the priority and the domination with the number of engagements. The brand was able to generate more likes, comments, and shares which is integral for the visibility of the brand. The total amount of engagements per content was Adidas: 2.428, Visa:29, SNCF:20, and Coca-Cola:60 (Vincent,2020).
Brands during an event can use the option of promoting itself through several types of marketing through social media, the goal is to release posts and interact with the costumers. There is no rule for Social media interactions while it depends on creativity and what brands think is the most beneficial platform is for their specific message that they are trying to deliver with each content. The most important matter is to measure the effect of this strategies followed by a brand.
Mentions for instance could be compared among brands, to discover the share of voice and who got a biggest or the smallest piece of the pie during a particular event. With the burst of social media, new metrics are also becoming important because of the constant change of the platforms
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on social media. For example, the ‘reach’ measures the number of people who watch an event and the number of viewers and followers on social media that get the hold and have the content generated by the brand on their social media feed. Engagement which is sometimes more important for the brands because it causes communication and conversation about the brand measures the number of interactions made by others on the posts such as number of likes, comments, and shares on social media (Vincent,2020). Engagements score could be broken down into these elements:
Instagram likes + Twitter Likes + Facebook likes + YouTube Likes + Retweets +Facebook shares + Twitter shares + audience comments + YouTube dislikes = Engagement score of the brands (Vincent,2020).
“Unique authors” and “Content shared by influencers” are two measures that brands are starting to consider valid in the recent years. Unique authors give the generated content online without even paying it is all published by fans on social media. Not to mention that it is argued that content generated on social media by the fans and not marketers is perceived to be more reliable by the audience. It is a win-win situation for the brand because it is free promotion in addition for saving portion of their advertising budget. Content shared by influencers is publications generated by celebrities, influencers and blogger who have a huge number of flowers.
This generates visibility to new potential customers and audience (Vincent,2020).
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3. Methodology
3.1 Content analysis approach
This thesis has been conducted with the objective of analyzing the strategy that the three chosen sports brands follow on their social media accounts. Secondary research was used to complete the theoretical part of this thesis. It mainly contained analyses that were already available through bibliographic sources. On the theoretical part, the development of social media strategies, the most popular platforms, and the benefits of social media strategy was discussed. Primary research and content analysis techniques were used in the practical part to understand the social media Facebook strategy of three sports brands from the data retrieved. The players that are included in the analysis were chosen according to the total revenue they had in the year 2019 when it comes to Nike and Adidas. This paper also involved the strategy of an emerging brand with the reason for exploring how modern brands are also competing on social media such as Under Armour. The comparison goes around how the brands are utilizing the biggest social media platform (Facebook) to achieve brand loyalty, increase brand recognition, and product recognition and decrease marketing costs.
As explained in section 1.3, Facebook is the most actively used social media platform Worldwide. For this reason, Facebook was chosen for the analysis. In Nike’s case, users are redirected to one page from all around the world, Nike does not share the same strategy as Adidas, and Under Armour where main page redirection depends on the regions automatically; Due to the Facebook language algorithms. The analysis conducted on Nike’s page is based on the worldwide page that Nike uses for all its fans. The analysis conducted on Adidas’s page is based on the worldwide page that Adidas uses for its worldwide users. When having the opportunity of choosing your region Adidas provides specific language preference for some specific territories, while the worldwide page is conducted in English, so everyone could understand it and it shares the most common content for worldwide purposes. The focus on athletes, events, and causes that are known worldwide. Product promotion is the same all over the world, this means while following the worldwide page the fans will not miss any product since it is the same all around the world. The same method is applied in the case of the Under Armour page too. Accordingly, the analysis was carried out for the last 100 posts published by each brand on Facebook. The analysis of 1-year posts method would not have worked in the case of these three brands, because Nike and Adidas in some years would post only one post, Under Armour posted only 24 posts in 2020.
To collect data from Facebook, one tool was used “Facepager”, which provides a free service to extract Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter Streaming contents to Excel file. To extract public content from Facebook to a text file, this script needs a user account and password and the page ID which was found on the URL once the user is on the Facebook page of each brand. There is more than one option for what type of data the user needs from the posts, Table 2 elaborates the principles used on the extraction requests used on the application. These
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data were collected on the 21st of October 2020, and the limit on the number of posts analyzed was set to 100 posts.
Table 2. Criteria used for the data extracted from the posts on Facepager These principles were chosen to get ahold of
the time each post was posted at. Also, to figure out the media format of the posts.
1) created_time, 2) updated_time, 3) type, 4) link, 5) attachments,
This principle was chosen to calculate the number of comments on each post.
6) comments. summary. total_count, This principle was chosen to calculate the
number of shares on each post.
7) Shares. summary. total_count, This principle was chosen to calculate the
number of total reactions including normal like on each post.
8) Total Reactions. summary. total_count,
These principles were chosen to calculate the number of love, ha-ha, wow, sad, and angry reactions on each post.
9) love. summary. total_count, 10) wow. summary. total_count, 11) ha-ha. summary. total_count, 12) sad. Summary.total_count, 13) angry. summary. total_count.
Source: Author
In this thesis, the following indicators from Table 2 are used to measure the strategy followed by each brands page:
A. Content category and type classification: The posts are manually classified according to the defined criteria that will be explored later in section 5.2
B. Media format: Photo, videos, and links – This information is collected automatically by the tool.
C. Timing Years, days, and hours – this information is given automatically by the tool used.
On the other hand, the fans reactions to the content are also provided by the tool used to conduct the analysis:
A. Number of likes per post: -This information is given by the tool used.
B. Number of shares per post: -This information is given by the tool used.
C. Number of comments per post: -This information is given by the tool used.
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D. Number of reactions per posts (Normal like, Love, Amazed, Angry, Laughing, Caring, Sad, other): -This information is given by the tool used.
All these variables are used to calculate and create the different indicators that are detailed ahead in the investigation. This bachelor thesis calculated the follower’s engagement interaction on each post category to get insights on which post category was reacted on the most for each brand, and the second calculation that this thesis provided, is the measurement of the weighted average consumer engagement on each brand to compare which brand has the most engagement when it comes to Facebook page engagement for further research.
A. The consumer interaction on each post category is calculated for each option in which the fans could communicate with the content such as (Reactions, Comments, and Shares). It splits measuring the average likes, comments, shares, and reactions on each category of posts for each brand. The average consumer engagement on each category for one post is calculated by dividing the total likes, comments, shares, and reactions that were summed for each category on the frequency of the category occurrence to get the average likes, comments, shares, and reactions per one post. Once the average is given, the calculation proceeded to obtain the percent of most to least reacted on category by calculating the average percent of likes, comments, shares, and reactions distribution among each category per post. This was done by multiplying each average from the reactions by a hundred and then dividing the result on the sum of averages for each category. This measurement provides the reader with the chance of dictating which category of posts was reacted on more, comparing to other categories for each brand, according to the average percent distribution of engagement per one post, for each category. The results will be presented in two appendices for each brand. The first appendix contains the percent distribution of likes, comments, and shares among categories. While the second appendix illustrates the reactions (Love, Ha-ha, Wow, Sad, and Angry) average percent distribution among categories of all the 100 posts.
B. The other type of measurement that was calculated in this paper was the average consumer interaction rate for each brand. The average consumer engagement rate for each brand is calculated as a total number of likes + total number of comments*3 + total number of shares*5 divided by the number of fans power of 0.8 (Unmetric, 2020). Unimetric developed the average engagement score formula through user studies and observation.
The use of the methodology of calculating the total number of likes, comments, and shares divided by the total number of fans or followers of a company is a weak measure of true engagement because a company with many fans/ followers will be unfairly rated according to their bigger fan/follower numbers. In Unimetric formulae, comments and shares are weighted higher than likes because comments and shares start a conversation.
The reception of the brand’s Facebook post varies as a function of the number of brand
