Social Media in Sports
Over the past decade, social media has had a major influence on the way sports teams have represented themselves to their fans and communities. “Focusing mainly on Instagram and Twitter, you can find most every major league organization with their own social media accounts where you can get all the important information about the league in general.” Since the emergence of social media, athletic teams have adapted to each new platform and utilized it for their own benefit. While social media is constantly changing, teams have to adapt and stay in the loop and maintain a positive brand image.
Facts
According to Kantar Media,“March Madness – the main season for U.S. college basketball – generated $1.24 billion of TV ad dollars in 2016, making it the seco
nd most valuable post-season sports tournament in the U.S. And while advertisers in the sports arena always want to go where the eyeballs are, they may want to shift their attention to social media, which has the potential for greater reach than TV.”
Advantages
When establishing an athletic team’s brand, it is ideal to have a page on the most popular social media platforms. Simply because, if you do not utilize social media in today’s society, you are limiting yourself in terms of gaining additional popularity or followers. Thus affecting the team’s fan base.
“For the sports marketer, social media can be a powerful tool. With blogs replacing newspapers and sideline reporters making their way onto Twitter, the integration of sporting events and social media is evident. Social media provides users with real-time updates, scores, and statistics for every team, 24 hours a day.”
“Social media allows for an incredibly close, immediate connection to your fans, which means that popular tools like Facebook and Twitter can be a valuable gathering point for feedback from followers.”
Disadvantages
When a sports team creates a social media page, they take on the responsibility of monitoring what is shared on the platform for the world to view. This applies not just to the team’s brand itself, but the athletes as well. 
“There can be drawbacks to the increased roll of social media, however—risks which teams must always consider and monitor. Social media introduces an ‘immediate’ aspect previously unavailable and largely what makes it so popular. When content is being dispersed instantly via Tweets or live video, for example, undesirable content can be shared unintentionally which can impact the integrity of the brand. For this reason, teams must always balance pushing content often and swiftly with monitoring the content they are producing. This is especially true when players and others are generating content.”
End Results
Social media has expanded the way sports teams of all sizes either rise in popularity or fail to gain a team based following.
It is important to note, that the team with the most social media followers may not be the best winning team. It might be the team in last place that is surpassing the social media efforts of the team in first place. This is what makes social media so special. It may not matter how many points you have but instead, how your followers feel about your online presence.
