A Longitudinal Analysis on Instagram Characteristics of Olympic Champions

TL;DR

This study analyzes Olympic champions' Instagram behavior over time, revealing how age and gender influence their social media engagement, self-presentation, and followings, with implications for athlete branding and interaction strategies.

Contribution

It provides a novel longitudinal analysis of Olympic athletes' Instagram characteristics, highlighting gender and age effects on social media behavior and engagement patterns.

Findings

Older champions have lower follower engagement rates.

Men increase self-presentation posts with age, women expand their followings.

Higher engagement correlates with reduced self-presentation and followings growth.

Abstract

This study examines Olympic champions characteristics on Instagram to first understand how age and gender affect the characteristics and their interrelations and second to see if the future changes in those characteristics are predictable. We crawled Instagram data of individual gold medalists in Rio2016 Olympic for a period of 4 months and utilized a content analytic method to analyze their photograph posts. The cross-sectional analysis shows as the champions get older, the rate of follower engagement decreases in both genders, but men increase their pure self-presentation posts while women extend their circle of followings. In its approval, the longitudinal analysis shows when the higher rate of engagement is achieved, then men and women champions lose their tendency in increasing self-presenting posts and number of followings respectively. These findings in the light of relative theories and the previous literature contribute to a better understanding of athletes cyber behavior in social media. Moreover, the findings serve as a guide for sport researchers seeking to grasp the ways that aid athletes to better interact with their followers and build the personal brand, which involves sponsorship and other promotional opportunities.