User Characteristics of Olympic Gold Medallists on Instagram: A Quantitative Analysis of Rio2016

TL;DR

This study analyzes the Instagram characteristics of Rio2016 Olympic gold medalists to identify gender differences and correlations, revealing insights into athlete branding and social media engagement.

Contribution

It provides a novel quantitative analysis of Olympic athletes' Instagram data, highlighting gender-based differences and relationships between age, posting behavior, and engagement.

Findings

Positive correlation between following/follower ratio and engagement/follower ratio for men.

Negative correlation between age and self-presenting posts for both genders.

Linear relationship between age and self-presentation for men.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine Olympic champions' characteristics on Instagram to first understand whether differences exist between male and female athletes and then to find possible correlations between these characteristics. We utilized a content analytic method to analyze Olympic gold medalists' photographs on Instagram. By this way we fetched data from Instagram pages of all those Rio2016 Olympic gold medalists who had their account publicly available. The analysis of data revealed the existence of a positive monotonic relationship between the ratio of following/follower and the ratio of engagement to follower for men gold medalists, and a strong negative monotonic relationship between age and ratio of self-presenting post of both men and women gold medalists which even take a linear form for men. These findings aligned with the relative theories and literature may come together to help the athletes to manage and expand their personal brand in social media.