The Relationship of Fans’ Sports-Team Identification and Facebook Usage to Purchase of Team Products

Abstract

Social media has become a regular direct marketing component for sports teams. This study explores the link between team identification and use of a professional sports team’s social-media channels. Questions to answer include, Does social media impact identification fans have with a team or vice versa? What does the amount of social-media use do to impact the relationship? Does this activity lead to increased sales of tickets and merchandise? Data collected by an Internet survey of fans of a professional baseball team show a positive relationship between team identification and use of the team’s Facebook page as well as to team related purchases. Implications for theorists understanding the role of social media in branding as well as implications for sports marketing are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.