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Student ReSeaRch

International Journal of Sport Communication, 2015, 8, 133 -148http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/IJSC.2014-0083© 2015 Human Kinetics, Inc.

Wang, a doctoral student, and Zhou, his professor, are with the College of Communication and Informa-tion Sciences, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL. Address author correspondence to Yuan Wang at ywang176@crimson.ua.edu

How Do Sports Organizations Use Social Media to Build Relationships? A Content

Analysis of NBA Clubs’ Twitter Use

Yuan Wang and Shuhua ZhouUniversity of Alabama, USA

Social media have been increasingly used by sports organizations to communi-cate with the public. This study explored the Twitter-using practices of National Basketball Association (NBA) clubs (N = 30) in the U.S. in building relationships with their fans during the 2013–14 season. Specifically, it focused on how these clubs used Twitter to build professional, personal, and community relationships through a content analysis of 5,561 tweets on their official Twitter sites. The results suggested that NBA clubs tended to use social media to develop professional relationships with their publics via sharing information and promoting products. There were significant relationships between relationship dimensions and the number of retweets and favorites from Twitter followers. Sports organizations should use social media effectively to strengthen the professional, personal, and community relationships with their publics.

Keywords: sport organization, organization–public relationship, relationship dimension, sport communication

Since their inception, social media have been playing a significant role through-out the world in all aspects of life. Both individuals and organizations are using social media to connect with their interested parties. In particular, social media have been used increasingly by sports organizations to communicate with consum-ers (Pedersen & Thibault, 2014). Among others, clubs of the National Basketball Association (NBA), one of the most successful sports brands in the world (Mullin, Hardy, & Sutton, 2007), have been using social media to make connections with sports fans and to promote their teams (Williams & Chinn, 2010).

The social-media use of sports organizations has drawn attention from both academia and the sport industry. According to Witkemper, Lim, and Waldburger (2012), Twitter has become the most popular social-media form in the sport indus-try. Throughout the major professional leagues in the United States, such as NBA, National Football League (NFL), and Major League Baseball (MLB), each team

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employs Twitter in some manner (Witkemper et al., 2012). Waters, Burke, Jackson, and Buning (2010) examined how NFL teams used Facebook and their official Web sites to develop relationships with fans using stewardship strategies and found that greater endeavors were devoted to their Web sites than to their Facebook pages. Hipke and Hachtmann (2014) explored how social-media strategy is used in Big Ten Conference athletic departments and found that the greatest benefit of social media was the ease of engagement and instantaneous connection between fans and teams. Nevertheless, there have been limited studies focusing on the relationship between sports organizations and their publics. Although content analysis has been used by a handful of researchers (i.e., Abeza, O’Reilly, & Reid, 2013; Blaszka, Burch, Frederick, Clavio, & Walsh, 2012), few of them examined sports organizations’ use of Twitter for building relationships (i.e., Abeza & O’Reilly, 2014).

The organization–public relationship (OPR) has become an important topic of study in public relations scholarship (Ferguson, 1984). While many researchers have examined the OPR from the public’s perspectives (i.e., Ki & Hon, 2007), only a handful of studies have explored the OPR establishment from the organizations’ perspective (i.e., Briones, Kuch, Liu, & Jin, 2011; Lovejoy, Waters, & Saxton, 2012; Nah & Saxton, 2013), especially for sports organizations (i.e., Waters et al., 2010). Furthermore, few studies have attempted to apply traditional OPR scale to the social-media use of sports organizations and to explore how they can establish relationships based on their interactions with social-media users.

This current study explored the social-media use of sports organizations in building relationships with their publics, mainly through the theoretical perspective of the OPR. A content analysis was conducted of the official Twitter sites of all 30 NBA clubs in the United States. More specifically, this research examined how sports organizations used social media to establish relationships with the public, which involved professional relationships, personal relationships, and community relationships. Furthermore, it incorporated relationship dimensions and the interac-tions with Twitter followers.

The current study could advance the literature on sport communication, sport public relations, and the OPR by providing empirical evidence of sports organiza-tions’ social-media use in relationship building and incorporating relationship typol-ogy between sports organizations and their publics. It posed a relationship-category scheme to examine how organizations used Twitter to build each dimension of relationship. On the other hand, this study could make some practical contributions by providing communication strategies for sports organizations to use social media effectively to establish diversified relationships with their key publics.

Literature ReviewOPR

To examine how sports organizations use social media to build relationships, I (first author) used the OPR as the key theoretical framework.

The OPR is defined as “the patterns of interaction, transaction, exchange, and linkage between an organization and its publics” (Broom, Casey, & Ritchey, 2000, p. 18). According to Ledingham and Bruning (1998), it is the state existing between an organization and its key publics, in which the actions of one party can affect

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the economic, social, cultural, or political well-being of the other. The relational perspective can identify the organizational function of public relations (Ledingham & Bruning, 1998), clarify the role of communication within that function (Leding-ham & Bruning, 2000), and provide an approach to determine the impact of public relations on the attainment of organizational goals (Ledingham & Bruning, 1997).

Researchers have increasingly focused on OPR dimensions (Hon & Grunig, 1999; Jo, Hon, & Brunner, 2004; Kim, 2001). For instance, the OPR can be cat-egorized into three dimensions: professional relationship, personal relationship, and community relationship (Bruning & Ledingham, 1999). This typology was considered the foundation to construct the multi-item and multidimensional scale for OPR measurement (Ledingham, 2003). According to Bruning and Ledingham, professional relationship can be determined through organizations’ adopting a professional role when dealing with key public members, personal relationship can be built through close connections and interactions between organizations and their individual stakeholders, and community relationship involves organizations’ commitment to and interaction with the community they serve. Based on this OPR scale, Bruning (2000) examined the role of personal, professional, and community relationships in respondent relationship and intended behavior and found that key public members who considered themselves as being in a relationship with an organization were more likely to intend to stay with that organization rather than turning to its competitors. Bruning and Ledingham found that professional and personal relationship, but not community relationship, influenced public satisfac-tion with a regional banking institution.

Grounded in previous research (i.e., Bruning & Ledingham, 1999; Bruning, 2000; Jo & Kim, 2003), the current study focused specifically on how sports organizations used social media to build professional, personal, and community relationship with their publics.

Social Media and Organizations

One of the available tools to build relationships with fans is social media, espe-cially Twitter. Social media can provide opportunities for organizations to interact directly with the public (Saffer, Sommerfeldt, & Taylor, 2013; Waters, Burnett, Lamm, & Lucas, 2009). Organizations can use social media to promote dialogues and two-way conversations with the public (Mersham, Theunissen, & Peart, 2009). Organizations can use social media to involve their stakeholders and build a com-munity under their mission and values (Lo & Waters, 2012).

Researchers have examined the social-media use of diverse organizations including community colleges (McAllister & Taylor, 2007), for-profit corpora-tions (Park & Reber, 2008), and nonprofit organizations (Kent, Taylor, & White, 2003). For example, Rybalko and Seltzer (2010) found evidence of “dialogue” via examining Twitter accounts of Fortune 500 companies. The functions that social media served for nonprofits comprised three major types: information sources, community builders, and promoters and mobilizers (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012).

Lovejoy and Saxton (2012) stated that organizations could use social media to create an online community via bonding messages with their followers. Organiza-tions’ literature could provide insights into community establishment, which might be applied to the measurement of community relationship in this study.

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Social Media and Sports

Social media have received increased attention in the sport industry (Pedersen, 2012). Researchers have started to explore how sports organizations (Gibbs, O’Reilly, & Brunette, 2014; Wallace, Wilson, & Miloch, 2011; Waters et al., 2010), athletes (Hull, 2014; Kassing & Sanderson, 2010; Lebel & Danylchuk, 2014), and fans (Clavio & Kian, 2010) use social media. Sport organizations, teams, and athletes have used social-media platforms to establish relationships with their respective audiences (Blaszka et al., 2012). Sport entities are ideally positioned to use social media, given existing fan bases and the ability to facilitate consumer interactions with sport products and with team members (Pedersen, 2012). Social media have changed the traditional way athletes interact with their fans and could help athlete users meet needs such as entertainment, diversion, and information gathering (Hambrick, Simmons, Greenhalgh, & Greenwell, 2010).

One social-media platform that has redefined communication among sports constituents is Twitter (Fisher, 2009). According to Clavio and Kian (2010), Twitter has become a permanent fixture in the sport communication landscape since its introduction in 2006. Some sports properties have actively engaged in partnerships with Twitter to create specific hashtag pages (Lawler, 2012). Sanderson and Kass-ing (2011) asserted that blogs and Twitter revolutionized sports media by engaging athletes and teams in producing content actively.

Sports organizations and sporting-event organizers need to identify the needs and motivations of sports consumers, use this information to shape their marketing communication online (Filo & Funk, 2005), and develop relationships with sup-porters (Beech, Chadwick, & Tapp, 2000). Williams and Chinn (2010) proposed a model for sports marketers that highlighted the importance of potential relationship-marketing goals through social media. The impact of social media on branding and marketing has also been used by sports organizations (Coyle, 2010).

Although sports organizations’ use of social media has been widely acknowl-edged (Gibbs et al., 2014), examinations of the role of social media in relationship establishment are limited, especially in professional teams. Researchers have called for an investigation of the Twitter-based relationship between sports organizations and fans (Hambrick et al., 2010). It has been suggested that there was a need to understand how sports organizations used social media from the relationship perspective.

Social-Media Use for Relationship Establishment

Relationship establishment through social media has received much attention from public relations scholars (i.e., Briones et al., 2011; Saffer et al., 2013; Waters & Jamal, 2011). Kent and Taylor (1998) provided strategies for communication pro-fessionals to use the Internet to develop relationships between organizations and the public. Briones et al. indicated the relationship-building potential of Facebook and Twitter via interviewing 40 employees from the American Red Cross and found that they developed two-way dialogues with younger constituents, the media, and the community.

Social media can afford organizations a new venue to cultivate relationships with stakeholders because of their potential in relationship establishment. Accord-ing to Bruning and Ledingham (1999), the OPR could be categorized into three

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types: personal, professional, and community relationship. Though OPR scales have been widely used in various organizations such as nonprofits (Waters et al., 2009) and for-profits (Bruning, 2000), fewer studies have focused on sports orga-nizations from the OPR perspective, especially in the social-media context. This perspective could be used to analyze the relationship building of organizations in serving the public, such as information sharing, promotion, and interactivity, to help sports organizations to use social media effectively. Thus, this issue was examined through the following research questions:

RQ1: How do sports organizations use Twitter to build relationships with the public?

Clavio and Kian (2010) indicated that sports fans reported using social media not only for fandom and information seeking but also for direct communication in an interactive manner. Wallace et al. (2011) studied how Facebook users interacted with content on Facebook pages of the NCAA organization and Big 12 Athletic Conference and found that the fan interaction was significantly different in both likes and comments between these two groups although their management techniques were similar. Although the interactions between Facebook users and the content on Facebook pages of organizations have been examined (i.e., Wallace et al., 2011), there seemed to be no prior research incorporating relationship dimensions and Twitter users’ interactions (e.g., retweets and favorites) with them. Sports orga-nizations could build each relationship dimension based on the way Twitter users interacted with them. Thus the following research question addressed this issue:

RQ2: How do Twitter users interact with each relationship dimension devel-oped by sports organizations?

Methodology

To address the research questions, a content analysis was conducted. Data on Twitter use of sports organizations were obtained from their official Twitter sites.

Sampling

To examine social-media use of sports organizations, NBA clubs in the United States were selected. The NBA is considered one of the four dominant professional sports leagues in the United States, other three being the NFL, MLB, and the National Hockey League (NHL; Research and Markets, 2012).

The first step was to determine whether these organizations owned official Twitter accounts. First, I searched the official Web site of the NBA and obtained a list of all 30 NBA clubs via http://www.nba.com/teams/ in January 2014. Then I looked up the name of each club via the Twitter search engine and found that each NBA club owned only one official Twitter account that had been marked as a verified account by Twitter. Thus, all the 30 NBA clubs were included in the final sample. I followed the official Twitter sites of all NBA clubs (N = 30) with my own Twitter account so the tweets on those sites could be collected through a professional tool, Twitter Tunnel.

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The research period was one constructed week (7 days) between October 29, 2013, the starting date of 2013–2014 NBA season, and February 28, 2014, the deadline of data collection for this research. This method was chosen because constructed-week sampling was demonstrated to be the most efficient sampling approach for content analysis of online news (Hester & Dougall, 2007), which is similar to Twitter posts of sports organizations. As a large number of tweets were posted by clubs every day, the amount of Tweets for one constructed week was reasonable for this study based on Hester and Dougall’s standards. Taking the calendar as the sampling frame, I first identified all the 17 Mondays during this period and randomly selected one Monday as the first day of the week. Then the procedure was repeated to select the remaining Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on to “construct” a week, ensuring that each source of cyclic variation was represented equally and therefore controlling for systematic variation (Song & Chang, 2012). Finally, I made the constructed week through selecting February 2, 2014 (Sunday); January 6, 2014 (Monday); November 12, 2013 (Tuesday); December 18, 2013 (Wednesday); October 31, 2013 (Thursday); January 17, 2014 (Friday); and Feb-ruary 22, 2014 (Saturday). The final sample consisted of 5,561 tweets from the official Twitter sites of the 30 NBA clubs during this period.

Measurement

According to Bruning and Ledingham (1999), the OPR can be categorized into three dimensions: professional, personal, and community relationship. Previous research have created a few classification systems for social-media engagement. Lovejoy and Saxton (2012) proposed three major functions of nonprofit organiza-tions’ microblogging: information, community, and action. Blaszka et al. (2012) created a scale from the uses-and-gratifications perspective to investigate Twitter use during major sporting events, which included interactivity, diversion, information sharing, content, fanship, promotion, and combinations of these.

Based on previous studies (e.g., Blaszka et al., 2012; Bruning & Ledingham, 1999; Hambrick et al., 2010; Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012), I developed an original Twitter-categorization scheme to examine how sports organizations used Twitter to establish relationships with the public (see Table 1). The major categories of professional, personal, and community relationship were oriented from Bruning and Ledingham’s OPR scale. The subcategories of information sharing, interac-tivity, promotion, and fanship were borrowed from sport communication studies (Blaszka et al., 2012; Clavio, 2008; Hambrick et al., 2010), the activity/event was from Lovejoy and Saxton’s community function of social media for nonprofit organizations, and the entertainment item was from the uses-and-gratifications approach (McQuail, 1983).

Professional relationships involved information sharing and promotion. Infor-mation sharing is defined as insight into athletes, teams, or sports, such as details about games and training sessions or recent events and results (Hambrick et al., 2010). It also includes links to pictures, videos, and other Web sites. Promotion is defined as publicity related to sponsorships and discounted tickets or giveaways (Hambrick et al., 2010).

Personal relationships could be built through online interactions between sports organizations and their fans through public messages or retweeting on clubs’ Twitter

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sites. The key indicators of this relationship dimension were “dialogic” messages and those that attempted to interact with followers via “bonding” messages such as tweets including “thank you” and “congratulations” (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012). According to Clavio (2008), interactivity means “giving input and opinions, par-ticipating in discussions and communicating with fellow fans” (p. viii). In addition to fans, this research examined other followers such as athletes and journalists because they have strong relationships with NBA clubs (Sheffer & Schultz, 2010).

Community relationships could incorporate Seo and Green’s (2008) fanship, meaning the “reason that one considers oneself a huge fan of particular sports and teams” (p. 86), and the entertainment item from the uses-and-gratifications approach, which included escaping from problems, relaxing, getting aesthetic enjoyment, filling time, and seeking emotional release (McQuail, 1983). Moreover, organizing online activities and offline events related to clubs was also considered an effec-tive way for sports organizations to establish communities. Thus, the community-relationship category involved organizing activities or events, entertaining fans, and facilitating fanship.

The second research question focused on how Twitter users interacted with each relationship dimension developed by sports organizations. It could be indicated

Table 1 Categorization Scheme for Relationship Building

Category Subcategory Examples

Professional relationship

Sharing information related to NBA teams, athletes, and/or games, such as details of each game, sports news, and content including links to other sites, etc.

Lakers: Injury Update: @paugasol’s MRI confirmed that he has a mild sprain of his right ankle. [link] (12/2/13)

Promoting tickets and derivative products related with clubs and other brands or products via advertising, public relations, etc.

HoustonRockets: ON SALE NOW! All January and February home games are now available! Get your tickets here: [link] (12/2/13)

Personal relationship

Interacting with followers such as fans, athletes, journalists, club staffs, etc., via “@” symbol messaging or retweeting

HoustonRockets: Our fan Alex Kiani has been making signs at home for us all weekend. Thanks for the support, Alex! [link] (1/26/14)

Community relationship

Organizing online activities with fol-lowers or promoting events related with clubs and community

Chicagobulls: For more info on An Evening w/ the Chicago Bulls that @Stacey21King just mentioned, visit [link] (1/29/14)

Fanship, expressions of emotion about the team or athletes, and show-ing love for them

SacramentoKings: retweeted: KatieCracc: Fans getting some love from @jimmerfredette before tonight’s game against Memphis. #ForeverPurple [link] (1/29/14)

Entertainment, such as having fun with fans and relaxing them

Dallasmavs: In other news, this is funny! #MavsSnapchat #DALvsWAS [link] (1/1/14)

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by the number of favorites and retweets generated by Twitter followers of sports organizations. Retweeting is a function of Twitter that allows one user to repost a tweet from another user by adding an “RT@ [username]” to the beginning of the tweet (Lovejoy et al., 2012). Based on previous Twitter measurements (Lovejoy et al., 2012; Mamic & Almaraz, 2013), I examined the numbers of favorites and retweets on the Twitter sites of sports organizations. The number of favorites is the number of users who clicked “Favorite,” and the number of retweets was identified as the number of users who retweeted the organizations’ tweets. Those numbers were displayed in the summary of each tweet. The unit of analysis was individual tweet on the official Twitter sites of the sampled clubs.

Coding Procedures and Intercoder Reliability

The database of this study contained 5,561 tweets posted by the 30 NBA clubs on their official Twitter accounts during the constructed week. Two coders participated in a training session where the coding protocol and code sheet were outlined and discussed. We developed the codes using an inductive process based on a review of tweets from a sample of NBA clubs in the constructed week. Most issues regarding the variables and coding protocol were discussed and resolved before we started to code the sample tweets.

The coding was based on the categorization scheme including descriptions and examples (see Table 1). Each tweet was assigned a single code from the categories. In cases where a tweet seemed to serve multiple purposes, it was sorted into the appropriate single category according to what was considered the tweet’s primary purpose. Discrepancies in coding were discussed and the coding scheme was revised until 100% agreement was reached (Hambrick et al., 2010). The numbers of retweets and favorites received by each tweet were also recorded.

Intercoder reliability was established before coding the full data set to ensure that both coders were interpreting the variables and coding the data set similarly (Blaszka et al., 2012). A 20% subsample of the data set that included 1,113 tweets was randomly selected and coded by each coder. According to Riffe, Lacy, and Fico (2008), an overlap of 10–20% of the data is acceptable for testing intercoder reliability. The intercoder agreement on relationship dimension was 90.5%, and the Cohen’s kappa score was .82, which indicated a highly acceptable level of intercoder reliability (Wimmer & Dominick, 2011). After the intercoder reliability was established, the two coders were provided with a copy of the whole data set, and the remaining 4,448 tweets in the set were randomly distributed to each coder.

The data analysis was conducted with SPSS version 22.0 through descriptive statistical analysis, chi-squared test, one-way ANOVA, and correlation analysis.

ResultsA total of 5,561 tweets was generated by the 30 sampled NBA clubs during the constructed week. The number of total tweets posted by each club during the research period ranged from 64 to 434 (M = 185.4, SD = 82.9). On average, each club posted 26.5 tweets per day (SD = 11.8), which varied from 9.1 to 62.0 tweets. A chi-squared test revealed that the number of tweets generated by each sampled club was not evenly distributed, χ2(29, N = 5,561) = 1,075.4, p < .001.

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The first research question focused on how sports organizations used Twitter to build relationships with the public. As shown in Table 2, most messages gener-ated by NBA clubs were classified as professional relationship (n = 3,971, 71.4%), including information sharing (n = 3,687, 66.3%) and promotion (n = 284, 5.1%). This suggests that NBA clubs used Twitter mainly as a medium to build profes-sional relationships with followers. They often shared information related to clubs, games, and athletes and promoted tickets and other products or brands, which was also consistent with their primary purpose of using Twitter. In addition, these clubs tended to report game details during each game. The number of tweets posted on game days seemed to be larger than other days, especially on game details. In terms of each club, the number of informational tweets posted by each club during this research period ranged from 50 to 303 (M = 123, SD = 51.4), and the proportion of such tweets among all the tweets ranged from 36.1% to 90.5% (M = 68.9%, SD = 0.15). The number of promotional tweets created by each club ranged from 2 to 26 (M = 9.5, SD = 6.6), and their proportions ranged from 0.9% to 13.6% (M = 5.3%, SD = 0.03).

According to Table 2, 14.9% of all tweets were categorized as personal rela-tionship (n = 829), indicating that NBA clubs also used Twitter as a platform for interpersonal communication with followers such as fans, athletes, journalists, and club employees. They responded to followers’ questions and shared their experi-ences and feelings through dialogic messages. The number of such tweets generated by each club during this period ranged from 0 to 109 (M = 27.6, SD = 30.7), and the proportion ranged from 0% to 40.5% (M = 12.5%, SD = 0.1).

The least frequent tweets were classified as community relationship (n = 791, 14.2%), which included activity/event (n = 464, 8.3%), fanship (n = 225, 4.0%), and entertainment (n = 72, 1.3%). This suggests that clubs paid the least attention to building community relationships on Twitter. In particular, the number of activ-ity/event tweets posted by each club during that period ranged from 1 to 42 (M = 15.5%, SD = 10.8), and their proportions ranged from 0.5% to 20.2% (M = 8.5%, SD = 0.05). The number of fanship tweets ranged from 0 to 36 (M = 7.5, SD = 8.4), and their percentages ranged from 0% to 9.8% (M = 3.4%, SD = 2.7%). In addition, the number of entertainment tweets ranged from 0 to 9 (M = 2.4, SD = 2.8), and their proportions ranged from 0% to 6.9% (M = 1.3%, SD = 0.02).

Regarding the proportion of each club’s tweets, 29 clubs (96.7%) focused most on professional relationship, with the largest proportion of those tweets

Table 2 Frequency Distribution of Relationship Categories

Category Subcategory Frequency Percentage

Professional relationship Information 3,687 66.3%Promotion 284 5.1%

Personal relationship Interactivity 829 14.9%

Community relationship Activity/Event 464 8.3%

Fanship 225 4.0%

Entertainment 72 1.3%

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related to information sharing and promotion. Only one club (3.3%) focused most on personal-relationship building with the most interactive tweets. There were no clubs, however, whose tweets were most associated with community relationship.

The second research question focused on how Twitter users interacted with each relationship dimension developed by sports organizations. Of all the tweets posted by clubs, 96.0% (n = 5340) received retweets, and 96.8% of them (n = 5382) received favorites from other users. On average, each tweet had 54.8 retweets (SD = 180.9), ranging from 0 to 6274, and each tweet received an average of 49.2 favorites (SD = 158.8), ranging from 0 to 7152. For each club, the average retweets received by each tweet ranged from 9.9 (SD = 9.7) to 323.3 (SD = 616.4), and the average favorites received by each tweet ranged from 7.7 (SD = 7.8) to 280.1 (SD = 597.0). A correlation analysis suggested that there were significant relationships between the number of followers of each club and the average of retweets (r = .833, p < .01) and favorites (r = .778, p < .01) received by each tweet for each club and respective clubs.

The means of retweets and favorites for each relationship dimension are dis-played in Table 3. A one-way ANOVA showed that there were significant relation-ships between relationship dimensions and the number of retweets, F(5, 5555) = 8.511, p < .001, and favorites, F(5, 5555) = 15.464, p < .001. On average, fanship tweets received the most retweets (M = 111.4) and favorites (M = 122.2), while promotional tweets received the fewest retweets (M = 19.9) and favorites (M = 18.9). It could reflect that fanship might be a significant factor that motivated followers of NBA clubs to retweet and favorite. Promotional behaviors of clubs on Twitter were relatively less attractive among their followers, receiving fewer retweets and favorites. In addition, entertainment tweets also received many retweets (M = 105.8) and favorites (M = 96.4). One possible explanation was that Twitter followers had a higher level of entertainment need, which could be satisfied through retweeting and favoriting on Twitter.

Of all the 5,561 tweets, 17.5% were retweets (n = 971). The degree to which the retweeting tool was used by the sampled NBA clubs confirmed previous research on nonprofit organizations. For example, Lovejoy et al. (2012) found that 16.2% of nonprofit organizations’ tweets were retweets. The clubs posted an average of 33 retweets (SD = 28.6), ranging significantly from 1 to 94. Further analysis revealed that the retweeting sources included athletes, sports journalists, and club employees.

Table 3 Mean Numbers of Retweets and Favorites for Each Category

Category Subcategory Retweets, M (SD) Favorites, M (SD)

Professional relationship Information 56.6 (131.8) 45.5 (82.8)Promotion 19.9 (37.7) 18.9 (30.5)

Personal relationship Interactivity 64.7 (238.5) 74.8 (228.6)

Community relationship Activity/Event 39.4 (225.38) 34.8 (162.3)

Fanship 111.4 (448.1) 122.2 (509.3)

Entertainment 105.8 (271.0) 96.4 (186.2)

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In addition, a one-way ANOVA showed that the number of retweets received was significantly different between retweets (M = 81.5, SD = 331.9) and original tweets (M = 49.2, SD = 121.5), F(1, 5559) = 26.585, p < .001. The number of favor-ites was also significantly different between retweets (M = 82.9, SD = 323.4) and original tweets (M = 42.0, SD = 85.2), F(1, 5559) = 55.381, p < .001. Retweeted tweets were found to receive more retweets and favorites from followers than original tweets. Therefore, retweeting could be an effective tool to draw retweets and favorites from followers.

DiscussionThe development of social media has provided a great opportunity for sports orga-nizations to establish relationships with the public and their core stakeholders. To find out whether they tapped into this potential, this study examined the relationship building of sports organizations and the interactions between individual Twitter users and relationship dimensions. This study might be one of the first attempts to incorporate relationship typology between sports organizations and their publics with Twitter users’ interactions.

One major finding was that NBA clubs focused more on building professional relationship with their Twitter followers, which included information sharing and promoting. More specifically, information sharing might be the primary purpose for which sports organizations used Twitter. This finding supported the study on nonprofit organizations conducted by Lovejoy and Saxton (2012), which also found that information served as the major function of the nonprofits’ Twitter use. The information that NBA clubs released on Twitter included news, announce-ments, events, and contents that were related to clubs, teams, games, and athletes. Although social media have been widely considered a two-way communication medium (Abeza et al., 2013), dialogue might not be the key form of organizations’ social-media use. According to Lovejoy and Saxton, nonprofit organizations relied on informational communication rather than interactive communication on their social-media accounts. This might have important implications for sports organi-zations. They could continue to share information from various sources, such as organization announcements, information from news media, and so on. On the other hand, obtaining sports information might be the primary purpose of sports fans following these organizations’ Twitter accounts. By comparison, professional athletes used social media mainly to maintain the personal relationship with fans (Hambrick et al., 2010).

The personal relationship in the current study was between sports organizations and Twitter followers including fans, athletes, and celebrities. Such tweets might receive many retweets and favorites due to their associations with some sports stars and celebrities. These types of messages provided insights into the interpersonal communication between social-media operators of sports organizations and poten-tial consumers. Sports organizations should take the personal interest, thoughts, and feelings of their followers into consideration and interact with them via public messages or retweeting on Twitter to build personal relationship with followers. This reflects the principle that consumers always come first. Ordinary fans could feel recognized and cared about by sports organizations when their Twitter accounts or tweets were exposed to all the other followers of those organizations.

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The proportions of community relationship and personal relationship were quite similar, which revealed that sports organizations paid similar attention to these two relationships types. To build the community relationship, tweets about activi-ties and events were posted most frequently. According to Kassing and Sanderson (2010), event-specific posts on social media were able to cultivate and increase interactivity with the public. Organizing online activities and offline events could encourage Twitter followers to join in the community of a sports organization and feel part of it. Many organizations have been developing social-media strategies to establish virtual communities with stakeholders (Li & Bernoff, 2008). Moreover, sports organizations could express emotions and show love for their team and athletes through retweeting their tweets or “@”-ing them.

Another finding was that there were significant relationships between relation-ship dimensions and followers’ interactions. The retweets and favorites could be effective indicators that determined the attractiveness of each tweet. The reason-able use of social media can potentially strengthen the professional, personal, and community relationship with the public. For instance, if sports organizations aim to draw attention from their Twitter followers, they could post more tweets on fanship and entertainment because these types of updates could attract more retweets and favorites from followers. Retweeting has been demonstrated as a reliable indicator of the popularity and influence of Twitter messages (Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon, 2010). Organizations could increase their visibility and credibility by using the retweeting tool.

Based on the findings of this research, I could provide some practical sugges-tions for sports organizations to use Twitter effectively in building relationships. The relationship categories posed in this study might be considered a blueprint for sports organizations to develop relationships with their publics with the help of social media. The reasonable use of Twitter might rely on understanding the needs of sports organizations and the public. Moreover, sports organizations should learn from each other and explore the most effective ways to operate their Twitter sites. In particular, they could organize more online activities on Twitter, such as voting on the MVP (most valuable player) of each game, guessing game results, and so on. They might focus on tweets related with fanship and entertainment to draw attention from Twitter followers. They might also create more opportunities for interactions between star athletes and their fans through public messages and retweets. In this way, the fans of specific stars could learn more about their affili-ated sports organizations and become their potential public. In the future, sports organizations might develop specific tweets targeted at smartphone users (Gibbs et al., 2014).

This article adds to the growing body of literature on social-media use of sports organizations to build relationships with their key publics (i.e., Wallace et al., 2011; Waters et al., 2010). It applied a traditional offline OPR scale (Bruning & Ledingham, 1999) to the online context of social media. Furthermore, the rela-tionship scale and its association with Twitter users’ interactions as used in this study could be applied beyond sports organizations. This scale incorporated stud-ies on sport communication (Blaszka et al., 2012; Hambrick et al., 2010), public relations (Bruning, 2000), and organizational communication (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012). Therefore, it could have applicability to many kinds of organizations includ-ing for-profit and nonprofit organizations. In addition, the interactions between

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relationship dimensions and Twitter users might provide a new direction for sport communication research and OPR research. The study measured the frequencies of each relationship dimension and summarized the Twitter-use patterns of sports organizations in developing relationships with the public. Drawing from previous usage patterns, sports organizations could develop each relationship dimension on social media more effectively.

In practice, this research also has some implications for the sport industry. The findings on Twitter users’ interactions with relationship dimensions could encourage sport practitioners to facilitate two-way conversations and to use social media reasonably. This study provided some strategies for sports organizations to use social media to build relationships with stakeholders. Sports management could integrate this relationship scale into their overall communication and marketing strategies (Abeza & O’Reilly, 2014).

Limitations

It is important to note some limitations of this study. First, each tweet was coded into one of the six categories, yet some of them might fit into more than one category as they were not strictly mutually exclusive. Occasionally, it was hard to reach a consensus regarding the predominant purpose of a tweet and into which single category we should place it. Second, the research period was only 1 week due to the extremely large number of tweets (N = 5,561) generated by the sample NBA clubs.

Future Research

Future studies would benefit from comparing the social-media-use patterns of several types of sports organizations such as NFL clubs, NBA clubs, and MLB clubs. They could examine how various organizations rely on different relation-ship dimensions. In addition, researchers could conduct surveys to examine the relationship between the motivations of organizations and their social-media-use behaviors through the uses-and-gratifications approach.

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