The Investigation of Soccer Fans’ Social Media Using Motivations

Abstract

Social media has become an indispensable part of the daily lives of most people who have come into contact with technology, and is one of the basic sources of communication and free expression. The popularity and number of social media users, which shape people’s behavior and enable online socialization, is increasing day by day. This increase can be largely attributed to the increasing number of computers, tablets, and especially smartphones, as well as the decreasing age of users. From this point of view, the aim of this study is to determine the motives of fans of the teams of the Turkish Football Super League for using social media. In this framework, a total of 460 people who were selected from the population according to the principle of random sampling constitute the sample of the study. In the study, the “Personal Information Form” prepared by the researcher was used to determine the demographic characteristics of the participants, and the “Motivations of Fans to Follow Their Teams on Social Media Scale” was used to investigate the fans’ motives for using social media. The descriptive statistics of the variables were conducted in the form of percentages (%), frequency, mean, and standard deviation using SPSS 25 package program for the analysis of the research. On the other hand, the t-test for independent samples and analysis of variance, which are parametric tests, were used to test the relationships between the variables. The result is that in the study of the motivations of fans to follow the accounts of the teams they support in social media, the gathering of information, sharing of information and the perception of being a fan are the most important. Therefore, it is recommended that clubs get to know their fan base and enrich the content of strongly preferred social media accounts according to the identified motivations to ensure the active participation of fans in this process.