Fans, Media and Organizations: Hashtagging the 2013 World Series

Pop Culture?

• Sports are a major part of our culture• The sports fandom is different than many

other genres

Twitter and Fandom

• According to Twitter one of its most prominent uses is the discussion of events

• Most of the research centers around live television shows and discusses how Twitter is used as a technology for facilitating fanaticism

• During 2011 Twitter reported that major live events generated the most tweets per second,

• Little research on how fans use Twitter during live sporting events

Hashtagging

• Fans gravitate towards hashtags when watching live events

• We see promotion of hashtags on television shows and commercials

• During live sporting events the teams, broadcast partners and sponsors advocate the use of particular hashtags

Objective of Paper

• Determine how baseball fans used Twitter during the World Series to see if it differs from fans of live television

• Begin to examine the efficacy of organizations promoting hashtags

Research

• This paper uses a quantitative approach to discover how audiences expressed fanaticism throughout the 2013 Major League Baseball World Series on Twitter

• The the total number of tweets containing each hashtag from three hours before the selected game until noon the following day

• Each game was divided into six distinct time periods for analysis

Top Hashtags

Results

Results

Results

Discussion

• The results from this study indicate that baseball fans do not use Twitter in the same way has predicted by the existing literature

• We can see this phenomenon by looking at the results game by game

Game 1

Game 2

Game 3

Game 4

Game 5

Game 6

2014 Study

• The results from this study are mixed because the research was conducted following the World Series

• Limitations resulted from this:– Twitter archives meant no content analysis– Only tracking fans who used a hashtag– No idea how the hashtags evolved

• Live study