Dealing With Statistical Significance in Big Data: The Social Media Value of Game Outcomes in Professional Football

Abstract

The identification of relevant effects is challenging in Big Data because larger samples are more likely to yield statistically significant effects. Professional sport teams attempting to identify the core drivers behind their follower numbers on social media also face this challenge. The purposes of this study are to examine the effects of game outcomes on the change rate of followers using big social media data and to assess the relative impact of determinants using dominance analysis. The authors collected data of 644 first division football clubs from Facebook (n = 297,042), Twitter (n = 292,186), and Instagram (n = 312,710) over a 19-month period. Our fixed-effects regressions returned significant findings for game outcomes. Therefore, the authors extracted the relative importance of wins, draws, and losses through dominance analysis, indicating that a victory yielded the highest increase in followers. For practitioners, the findings present opportunities to develop fan engagement, increase the number of followers, and enter new markets.