ABSTRACT
Post COVID-19 pandemic, sports events and sports activities have been severely affected. The mega sports events were either postponed or held in the absence of live audience. Through this study we investigate the progressive use of social media by fans and other stakeholders to express their support to favorite sports teams, athletes, coaches, sports organizations, sponsors and more during COVID-19. UEFA Euro 2020 was conducted across 12 countries with an intent to show unity and bring normalcy in sports business during the third wave of COVID-19. Hashtag analysis and mention analysis have been performed to find sports teams, athletes or other stakeholders that were directly being discussed about by the fans. We also focused on tweet context annotations that provide entities as pairs of domain and entity collected from tweets’ text. Our results indicated that hashtags and mentions alone cannot substantially justify the popularity of any entity. Thus, from the point of view of identifying any athlete, team, organization or any sponsor as a brand, tweet context annotations can be valuable from the perspective of E-Branding, E-Marketing and E-Commerce. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
Sports watching both through offline as well as online mode has always been fancied by the sports lovers. We investigate the explicit use of social media by sports enthusiasts to show their support and solidarity for their favorite sports team or a particular sportsperson virtually i.e., via e-participation. For experimentation, we have considered the fourth Test match played between India versus Australia from 15–19 January, 2021 during Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2020–2021. During these five days period, a total of 69,965 tweets on Twitter were collected by us favoring both teams. Various statistical techniques coupled with social media analytics such as polarity and emotion analysis have been applied on the collected data to get valuable insights for our results. Our experimental results unambiguously indicate that sports enthusiast globally is using social media as important alternate media to show their support towards their favorite sports team virtually, via e-participation. The emergence and amalgamation of social media and marketing has provided newer horizons to various stakeholders i.e., both viewers and broadcasters to maximize e-participation. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.