Utilizing social media as a marketing communication tool: An examination of mainstream and niche sport athletes' Facebook pages

Abstract

The importance of sport brands maintaining a presence on Face­book has increased exponentially over the life of the service, which was founded in 2004. Intemet consumers have slowly changed thefr preferences for content searching, focusing more on shal'ed content and less on utilizing web searches. TI1is seismic shift in infor­mation gathering was borne out in. 2010, when Facebook exceeded Google in U.S.-based Web h'affic (Pepitone, 2010), and when Google responded by inte­grating its own content-sharing Google+ service into its seai-ch results (Kerr, 2012). Recent audience sh1dies have found that consumers are more likely to learn about brands whose products they pmchase through social networking sites, specifically Facebook and Twitter (Thomas, 2011). Facebook also ranks as the top United States· site for stickiness, which is a measure of how long a user stays on a given Web site and consumes content (TI10mas).