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A longitudinal analysis on Instagram characteristics of Olympic champions

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Abstract

This study examines Olympic champions’ characteristics on Instagram to first understand how age and gender affect the characteristics and their interrelations and second to see if the future changes in those characteristics are predictable. We crawled Instagram data of individual gold medalists in the Rio2016 Olympics for four months and utilized a content analytic method to analyze their photograph posts. The cross-sectional analysis shows that as the champions age, the follower engagement rate decreases in both genders. However, men increase their pure self-presentation posts while women extend their circle of followings. In its approval, the longitudinal analysis shows that when a higher engagement rate is achieved, men and women champions lose their tendency to increase self-presenting posts and the number of followings, respectively. In the light of relative theories and the previous literature, these findings contribute to a better understanding of athletes’ cyber behavior in social media. Moreover, the findings serve as a guide for sport researchers seeking to grasp the ways that aid athletes to better interact with their followers and build the personal brand, which involves sponsorship and other promotional opportunities.

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Acknowledgements

The study was partially funded by City University of Hong Kong Center for Communication Research (No. 9360120) and Hong Kong Institute of Data Science (No. 9360163).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong

    Amirhosein Bodaghi

  2. Department of Computing Science, Centre of Mathematical and Natural Sciences–CCMN, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Jonice Oliveira

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  1. Amirhosein Bodaghi
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  2. Jonice Oliveira
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Correspondence to Amirhosein Bodaghi.

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The dataset is publicly available on the Internet http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3865885. Also, the codes for data analysis which we will get to in the next section, all have been written by python and are publicly available on the Github https://github.com/AmirhoseinBodaghi/P7.

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Bodaghi, A., Oliveira, J. A longitudinal analysis on Instagram characteristics of Olympic champions. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 12, 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00838-9

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