Examining United States Professional Women’s Volleyball Entities Use of Twitter for Social Media Marketing and Brand Development

2018 dissertation for MSc. International Business Management. Selected by academic staff as a good example of a masters level dissertation. The usage of social media as a sport marketing medium has been on the rise over the past decade. Numerous organisations, athletes, and coaches are putting a higher degree of emphasis on reaching their fans and consumers through social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, rather than more traditional mediums. Previous research has stressed consumers transition from traditional marketing media to online and more readily accessible options. A majority of studies focus on the social media marketing of mainstream professional sport, as well as household name professional athletes, but few focus on a niche sport such as professional women’s volleyball. This research aims to observe how professional volleyball organisations in the United States are choosing to market through the social media platform Twitter. Furthermore, it aims to gather an understanding of brand development practices that could equate to consumer’s brand awareness. Through answering this research question, marketing and brand development implications are revealed regarding professional women’s sport. The research question is answered through the use of a qualitative content analysis of selected volleyball organisations Twitter accounts. A categorical codebook was created based on the research question of this thesis and previous literature. Data collection took place August 8th, 10th, and 12th of 2018. The first data tweets collected started on the 6th of August 2018 and were originally planned to scale back 100 tweets for each Twitter account. Once the data collection was complete, a total of 235 textual tweets were extracted for analysation. The tweets were categorised based on the codebook criteria created for this specific study. Following the categorisation marketing and brand development trends emerged. As a result, the research question was answerable