A (Meta) Picture is Worth a Thousand “Likes:” An Analysis of Engagement with Sports Network Images on Instagram-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

A (Meta) Picture is Worth a Thousand “Likes:” An Analysis of Engagement with Sports Network Images on Instagram

Published:2024-03-20 Issue: Volume: Page:
ISSN:2167-4795
Container-title:Communication & Sport
language:en
Short-container-title:Communication & Sport

Author:

Johnson Rich G.¹^ORCID,Romney Miles²^ORCID,John Kevin²

Affiliation:

1. Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

2. School of Communciations, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

Abstract

Previous studies on sports images have often focused on gender and race representation. However, with the rise of social media, sports photographers worldwide are fighting professionally produced and user-created images for audience attention. Recent scholarship has shown that stronger storytelling elements in sports photographs spur an increase in lower-level engagement metrics. The current study dives deeper into the types of images that generate key social media engagement. Researchers conducted a biometric analysis of 28 randomly sampled Instagram images from sports networks’ official feeds. Results indicate that social media images containing metacommunicative themes increase audience engagement. These findings offer insights into improving social media engagement for sports news sources.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Link

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/21674795241233174

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