Abstract
Olympic champions have been real idols for a significant portion of society, and by the advent of social media, their influence has increased rapidly. Despite their impact, they have been less studied. A primary step to grasp their cybercharacter is to examine their Instagram characteristics with possible gender differences and correlations between these characteristics. By applying a data-driven approach, this study utilizes a content analysis method to analyze photos of Olympic gold medalists on Instagram. In this vein, male gold medalists show a monotonously positive relationship between their following/follower ratio and the engagement/follower ratio. Also, the ratio of self-presentation turned out to have a solid monotonous negative relationship with age in both male and female gold medalists, which even takes a linear form in men. In line with the related theories and literature, these findings can help athletes manage and grow their brand on social media.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bodaghi, A.: A novel pervasive computing method to enhance efficiency of walking activity. Heal. Technol. 6, 269–276 (2016)
Frederick, E.L., Lim, C.H., Clavio, G., Walsh, P.: Why we follow: an examination of parasocial interaction and fan motivations for following athlete archetypes on Twitter. Int. J. Sport Commun. 5, 481–502 (2012)
Rui, J.R., Stefanone, M.A.: Strategic image management online. Inf. Commun. Soc. 16, 1286–1305 (2013)
Karg, A., Lock, D.: Using new media to engage consumers at the Football World Cup. In S. Frawley, D. Adair (Eds.), Managing the Football World Cup. Palgrave MacMillan, Melbourne (2014)
Lebel, K., Danylchuk, K.: How tweet it is: a gendered analysis of professional tennis players’ self-presentation on Twitter. Int. J. Sport Commun. 5, 461–480 (2012)
DeAndrea, D.C., Walther, J.B.: Attributions for inconsistencies between online and offline self-presentations. Commun. Res. 38(6), 805–825 (2011)
Eagleman, A.N.: Acceptance, motivations, and usage of social media as a marketing communications tool amongst employees of sport national governing bodies. Sport Manage. Rev. 16(4), 488–497 (2013)
Parmentier, M., Fischer, E.: How athletes build their brands. Int. J. Sport Manage. Market. 11(1/2), 106–124 (2012)
Marshall, P.D.: The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as a marker of presentational media. Celebrity Stud. 1(1), 35–48 (2010)
Bullingham, L., Vasconcelos, A.C.: ‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities. J. Inf. Sci. 39(1), 101–112 (2013)
Pegoraro, A., Jinnah, N.: Tweet ‘em and reap ‘em: The impact of professional athletes’ use of Twitter on current and potential sponsorship opportunities. J. Brand Strategy. 1(1), 85–97 (2012)
Hambrick, M. E., Kang, S. J.: Pin it: exploring how professional sports organizations use Pinterest as a communications and relationship-marketing tool. Commun. Sport., (2014). https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479513518044
Casaló, L., Flavián, C., Ibáñez-Sánchez, S.: Antecedents of consumer intention to follow and recommend an Instagram account. Online Inf. Rev. 41(7), 1046–1063 (2017)
Lee, M., An, H.:m “A study of antecedents influencing eWOM for online lecture, website: personal interactivity as moderator”. Online Inf. Rev., (2018)
Liu, W., Wu, X., Yang, W., Zhu, X., Zhong, S.: Modeling cyber rumor spreading over mobile social networks: a compartment approach. Appl. Math. Comput. 343, 214–229 (2019)
Bodaghi, A., Goliaei, S.: A novel model for rumor spreading on social networks with considering the infuence of dissenting opinions. Adv. Complex Syst. 21(6), 1850011 (2018)
Bodaghi, A., Goliaei, S., Salehi, M.: The number of followings as an influential factor in rumor spreading. Appl. Math. Comput. 357, 167–184 (2019)
Bodaghi, A., Oliveira, J.: The characteristics of rumor spreaders on Twitter: a quantitative analysis on real data. Comput. Commun. 160, 674–687 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2020.07.017
Souza, F., Casas, D., Flores, V., et al.: “Dawn of the selfie era: the whos, wheres, and hows of selfies on Instagram”. In: Proceedings of ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks, Palo Alto, CA, pp. 221–231. FF (2015)
Pittman, M., Reich, B.: Social media and loneliness: why an Instagram picture may be worth more than a thousand Twitter words. Comput. Human Behav. 62, 155–167 (2015)
Hochman, N., Schwartz, R.: “Visualizing ınstagram: tracing cultural visual rhythms.” AAAI Technical Report WS-12–03 Social Media Visualization (2013)
Silva, T., Melo, P., Almeida, J., Salles, J., Loureiro, A.: “A picture of Instagram is worth more than a thousand words: workload characterization and application”. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, pp. 123–132 (2013)
Burch, L.M., Clavio, G., Geurin-Eagleman, A.N., Major, L.H., Pedersen, P., Frederick, E.L., et al.: Battle of the sexes: gender analysis of professional athlete tweets. Global Sport Bus. J. 2(2), 1–21 (2014)
Geurin-Eagleman, A.N., Clavio, G.: Utilizing social media as a marketing communication tool: an examination of mainstream and niche sport athletes’ Facebook pages. Int. J. Sport Manage., 16(2) (2015)
Geurin, A., Burch, L.: Communicating via photographs: a gendered analysis of Olympic athletes’ visual self-presentation on Instagram. Sport Manage. Rev. 19(2), 133–145 (2016)
Zillich, A.F., Riesmeyer, C.: Be yourself: the relative ımportance of personal and social norms for adolescents’ self-presentation on ınstagram. Soc. Med. + Soc., 7(3) (2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211033810
Stsiampkouskaya, K., Joinson, A., Piwek, L., Stevens, L.: Imagined audiences, emotions, and feedback expectations in social media photo sharing. Soc. Med. + Soc., 7(3) (2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211035692
Riffe, D., Lacy, S., Fico, F.G.: Analyzing media messages: using quantitative content analysis in research, 2nd edn. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Mahwah, NJ (2005)
Smith, L.R., Sanderson, J.: I’m going to instagram It! an analysis of athlete self-presentation on instagram. J. Broadcast. Electron. Med. 59(2), 342–358 (2015)
Gazzaniga, M.S., Ivry, R. B., Magnun, G.R., Hustler, J.: Evolutionary perspectives. In: Gazzaniga, M.S., Ivry, R. B., Magnun, G. R. (eds.) Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind. W. W. Norton and Company, New York (2009)
Berk, L.E.: Self and social understanding. In: Berk, L. E. (eds.), Child Development. Pearson Education, Boston (2009)
Dovidio, J.F., Brown, C.E., Heltman, K., Ellyson, S.L., Keating, C.F.: Power displays between women and men in discussions of gender-linked tasks: a multichannel study. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 55(4), 580–587 (1988)
Fink, J.S., Kensicki, L.J.: An imperceptible difference: Visual and textual constructions of femininity in sports ıllustrated and sports ıllustrated for women. Mass Commun. Soc. 5(3), 317–339 (2002)
Hardin, M., Lynn, S., Walsdorf, K.: Challenge and conformity on contested terrain: Images of women in four women’s sport/fitness magazines. Sex Roles 53(1/2), 105–117 (2005)
Buffardi, L.E., Campbell, W.K.: Narcissism and social networking web sites. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 34, 1303–1314 (2008)
Kapidzic, S.: Narcissism as a predictor of motivations behind Facebook profile picture selection. Cyber Psychol. Behav. Soc. Netw. 16, 14–19 (2013)
Sheldon, P.: In Self-monitoring and narcissism as predictors of sharing Facebook. J. Soc. Media Soc. 5(3), 70–91 (2016)
Cook, J.M.: Gender, party, and presentation of family in the social media profiles of 10 state legislatures. Soc. Med. + Soc., (2016). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116646394
Rouse, L., Salter, A.: Cosplay on demand? ınstagram, onlyfans, and the gendered fantrepreneur. Soc. Med.+ Soc., 7(3) (2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211042397
Roberts, B.W., Edmonds, G., Grijalva, E.: It is developmental me, not generation me: developmental changes are more important than generational changes in narcissism—commentary on Trzesniewski and Donnellan (2010). Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 5, 97–102 (2010)
Foster, J.D., Misra, T.A., Reidy, D.E.: Narcissists are approach-oriented toward their money and their friends. J. Res. Pers. 43, 764–769 (2009)
Litchfield, C., Kavanagh, E.: Twitter, team GB and the Australian olympic team: representations of gender in social media spaces. Sport Soc., (2018)
Krane, V., Ross, S., Miller, M., Ganoe, K., Lucas-Carr, C., Barak, K.S.: It’s cheesy when they smile: what girl athlete prefer in images of female college athletes. Res. Q. Exerc. Sport 82(4), 755–768 (2011)
Tifferet, S., Vilnai-Yavetz, I.: Gender differences in facebook self_presentation: an international randomized study. Comput. Human Behav. 35, 388–399 (2014)
Bodaghi, A., Oliveira, J.: The theater of fake news spreading, who plays which role? a study on real graphs of spreading on Twitter. Expert Syst. Appl., (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2021.116110
Pandian, A.P.: Performance evaluation and comparison using deep learning techniques in sentiment analysis. J. Soft Comput. Paradigm. 3(2), 123–134 (2021)
Tripathi, M.: Sentiment analysis of Nepali COVID19 tweets using NB, SVM AND LSTM. J. Artific. Intell. Capsule Netw. 3(3), 151–168 (2021)
Manoharan, J.S.: Capsule network algorithm for performance optimization of text classification. J. Soft Comput. Paradigm 3(1), 1–9 (2021)
Manoharan, J.S.: Study on hermitian graph wavelets in feature detection. J. Soft Comput. Paradigm. 1(1), 24–32 (2019)
Bodaghi, A., Oliveira, J.: A longitudinal analysis on Instagram characteristics of Olympic champions. Soc. Netw. Anal. Mining. 12(1), 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00838-9
Bodaghi, A., Oliveira, J., Zhu, J.J.H.: The fake news graph analyzer: an open-source software for characterizing spreaders in large diffusion graphs. Softw. Impacts. 10, 100182 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.simpa.2021.100182
Funding
The study was partially funded by City University of Hong Kong Centre for Communication Research (No. 9360120) and Hong Kong Institute of Data Science (No. 9360163).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bodaghi, A., Zhu, J.J.H. (2022). The Olympic Gold Medalists on Instagram: A Data Mining Approach to Study User Characteristics. In: Pandian, A.P., Fernando, X., Haoxiang, W. (eds) Computer Networks, Big Data and IoT. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 117. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0898-9_58
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0898-9_58
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-19-0897-2
Online ISBN: 978-981-19-0898-9
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)