Fans want to know everything about their favorite team. No matter if it is the final score, the latest injury update on a star running-back or what time Aurea is going to make her flight around Jordan-Hare Stadium. Where can all of this information conveniently be found they might ask? Social media.

Social media can be defined as “relating to the sharing of information, experiences and perspectives through community-oriented websites” (Weinburg, 2009, p.1). This rise in social media has not gone unnoticed in the sports world. More specifically, Twitter has become the primary outlet for most breaking news stories, and it is easy to determine who breaks what story first. The platform was created in 2006 and in 2012, Twitter had over 630 million registered users and 250 active users (Hull & Lewis, pg. 19).

In short, social media has had an unwilling effect on sports as a whole. Almost every league, team and athlete has embraced the change and are now using these platforms as a way to directly interact with fans and tell their own story without having their words be checked by a Sports Information Director or marketing professional. Before social media, fans were only able to visit a team’s website, look at the content that had been filtered by the athletics department and the only way to share thoughts and opinions was through a message board if there was one available. Any interaction between fans and their favorite athletes was through a controlled channel and there was no way to see if the athlete was able to read the messages or not. There was no authenticity in the interactions.

With the social media phenomenon, the situation has changed, but the question is whether this is a good or bad thing? There is a whole new level of transparency offered by social media and this allows fans to have an all-access pass to their favorite athletes. Every day, fans from all over the world can check in on their favorite athletes and have an inside look at their everyday life. A Cam Newton fan can maybe see what he had for breakfast this morning or what song he was playing on his way to practice. “I think that social media can have both positive and negative aspects,” Josh Wetzel, Auburn Athletics Digital Media Director said. “You have direct feedback all of the time and you know what’s going on and how your fan base feels. It makes marketing a little but easier, but in the terms of Power 5 college football, when you have thousands of fans tweeting that they want to fire a coach that weighs a lot heavier on the people making those decisions. Obviously, you do not want your key stakeholders to be angry and also angry about it and ranting on social media. So, I think it is kind of a twofold thing.”

As a Digital Media Intern for Auburn Athletics, I manage the official Instagram account for the department. Since Auburn’s football season has had its fair share of ups and downs, some fans have taken to our comments section on Instagram to share their opinions. Some users commented, “Win this time” or “Bench him please,” talking about Bo Nix after the loss against the Florida Gators. This is where social media turns negative. These comments come in from people who think that the athletes or even the managers of the account will not see, but they are wrong. After reading some of the comments about Bo and his teammates, I had to stop posting pictures of individual players until Auburn’s momentum picked back up.

All social media platforms have changed the way that we get information and how we communicate. Everything we need to know about any game going on anywhere in the country is right in the palm of your hand. It is almost too easy to open up Twitter and find out information and even see some game action that you could not see watching the game at home. Social media gives fans the capability to share their opinions about players, coaches and organizations. For example, there are plenty of beat writers for Auburn that live tweet each event happening on the Plains. “Live tweeting is so different from sport to sport,” said Plainsman Sports Writer Harrison Tarr. “Fast-paced, high scoring games like basketball and volleyball are significantly more difficult than slower sports such as baseball or football, and you have to kind of find your own rhythm and strategy for each of them.”

Twitter more specifically has changed the way that us as fans watch games. It is not only the speed in which updates and highlights are posted, it is the uniqueness of the platform itself. “Twitter prides itself on being the world’s largest sports bar,” said Wetzel. “It has drastically changed the way we watch sports as a whole, some for good and some for bad. In the good way I think it has brought a lot more attention to sports as a whole because it is more interactable. So, when you see a sweet dunk or an awesome catch, you have the power at your fingertips to go and interact with other fans within that moment. You can really feel like you are part of the game whether you are part of it or not.”

“As a sportswriter, I live on Twitter. It has become the primary outlet for all news sources, and reigns supreme in terms of timeliness,” Tarr said. “Before games I’m always tweeting photos of the sites around a field or arena, during the game I provide live-tweet analysis, and after games I tweet out press releases and new articles.”

The emergence of Twitter has also had implications on traditional media and marketing strategies. Traditional media like newspapers and magazines have already been on the decline, but with the quickness of stories being broken on Twitter, these mediums are deteriorating every day. Traditional news outlets have been changing right before our eyes, so the decline is no surprise. Now that almost everyone has a smartphone and/or tablet of some sort, it has created a new era for news. Marketing strategies are also having to do some readjusting because of a nationwide decline in ticket sales. “More people are choosing to stay home and watch it on TV in their homes rather than go to the games because they do have those instant highlights and instant interaction with teams all within their own homes for a lot cheaper,” said Wetzel.

This rise in digital interactions is causing a major decline in audience size for local sportscasts. Just like how newspapers and magazines are on the downfall, the concern is now on the rise for television sportscasts. Research done at the University of Florida suggests that “Twitter is more attractive medium for connected fans in ways that transcend Twitter’s obvious advantage in timeliness,” (Hull & Lewis, pg. 16). As most sports fans know, there is nothing like walking into a stadium on a Saturday with 80,000 of your closest friends that are all rallying around one goal. With over 250 million active users, Twitter can also provide a sense of community. The platform allows participants to form bonds and create conversation about shared interests and passions that can go way beyond sports. Connected fans are those who use the Internet once a day to follow their favorite players and teams and utilize all aspects of sports media as a whole. These fans use websites and newspaper to get their news as well as use social media as a bridge to share thoughts and opinions about what is going on with their organization. Twitter was the first platform to utilize hashtags, which allows for users to search a keyword, phrase or name into a search bar and interact with those who have joined in on the same conversation. Hashtags allow for more conversations to be formed. Hull and Lewis interviewed Joe Dubin, an award-winning sports journalist who decided to leave the television news realm. “Now with Twitter and Facebook, nobody’s waiting around until 6:30 [p.m.] to watch sports,” Dublin said.

Twitter allows fans to be identifiable, not just a voice in a crowd. It has helped sports journalists around the world to put a name and face to their writing and also be able to grow their readership by posting opinions, asking questions and generating overall conversation every day. This speaks to social aspect of sports. Twitter allows fans to create conversations and build friendships that wave religious, social and political views that cause tension in society today. “Therefore, the world of sports fosters social connections, a feature that is ideally suited for social media such as Twitter,” (Hull & Lewis, pg. 17).

Hull and Lewis were also able to figure out one of the core elements that makes Twitter so infectious: brevity. Similar to texting, Twitter allows for quick conversation between an endless number of users. Since the maximum characters allowed in a single tweet is 140, it allows for users to mindlessly scroll through their timeline and get the latest updates.

Our society today is all about convenience and timeliness. Twitter allows for quick bits of information to be taken in at once, instead of reading a whole post-game story or waiting for commentators to give their analysis of a game. Fans can find their highlights and find professional opinions on the game, if they follow the right people. Journalists have started to embrace the change in mediums, and it has become a tool for not just athletes, but for teams and organizations as well.

Through social media, athletes and their organizations are able to tell their story, their way. Athletes are able to share their personal life with those who look up to them so fans can feel a sense of connection. Each platform allows for the distribution of unique information that just cannot be shared in a newspaper or a web article. Conversations are now global and sporting events have surpassed a new level of significance. Twitter has become a “source of information and a connective tissue” (Hull & Lewis, pg. 26). Wetzel said, “The shareability of Twitter and those viral moments is what has quote on quote “changed the game.”

Works Cited

Burns, Mark J. “How Twitter Is Part Of The 'Fabric' Of Sports In 2014.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 29 Dec. 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/markjburns/2014/07/25/how-twitter-is- part-of-the-fabric-of-sports-in-2014/#660529c82af4.

Harrison Tarr, In-Person Interview. 6 December 2019.

Hull, Kevin, and Norman P. Lewis. “Why Twitter Displaces Broadcast Sports Media: A Model in: International Journal of Sport Communication Volume 7 Issue 1 (2014).” International Journal of Sport Communication, Human Kinetics, Inc., 15 May 2019, doi.org/10.1123/IJSC.2013-0093.

Josh Wetzel, In-Person Interview. 4 December 2019.

Pegoraro, Ann. (2010). Look who's talking - Athletes on Twitter: A case study. International Journal of Sport Communication. 3. 501-514.