The goal of this research is to understand the role of social media and how they are used by sports clubs and how they play a role in increasing customer interactivity and spectator interest. The example of Facebook has been taken. In fact, social media has proven to be a fast-growing online tool and is still continuing to grow along with its users (Malthouse et al., 2013; Colliander & Dahlén, 2011; Karami, Dahl, Turner-McGrievy, Kharrazi, & Shaw, 2018; Kim & Hastak, 2018).To gather the information two integrated methods have been included to measure the website interactivity. By taking into account the degree to which a person believes a website allows a free flow of information. In fact,Hoffman and Novak (2009) discussed the fact that consumers are actively interacting with the web, when they are in the mentality and motivated to learn more about the organization itself and more inclined to increase their involvement within that organization.
The investigation has been carried out about the thirty-two Facebook pages. It was found that greater customer interactivity can be deemed attractive and can increase spectatorship, in fact, according to Huang (2003, p. 437), the interactivity between a website and its audience can be increased by designing an active and interactive site that represents an ‘online community. The research also found that the level of website interactivity of a particular football club is not dependent upon their performance within the tournament. In fact, the result of the study shown that there is medium correlation between total Facebook interactivity and total likes which signified a relationship.
To conclude, the results also shown the notion that “to uphold complete engagement, one must interest the consumer and maintain conversation.” Also, the performance of the football club in this case is not the only variable as the website interactivity do not depend on it but it may depend on other factors being availability of funding for marketing for example, which could be researched further in future studies.
References
Karami, A.A. Dahl, G. Turner-McGrievy, H. Kharrazi, G. Shaw, 2018, Characterizing diabetes, diet, exercise, and obesity comments on Twitter. International Journal of Information Management, pp. 1-6
D.L. Hoffman, T.P. Novak, 2009, Flow online: lessons learned and future prospects. Journal of interactive marketing, pp. 23-34
E.C. Malthouse, M. Haenlein, B. Skiera, E. Wege, M. Zhang 2013, Managing customer relationships in the social media era introducing the social media house. Journal of Interactive Marketing, pp. 270-280
Huang, 2003, Designing website attributes to induce experiential encounters, Computers in Human Behavior, pp. 425-442
Colliander, M. Dahlén, 2011, Following the fashionable friend: The power of social media weighing publicity effectiveness of blogs versus online magazines. Journal of Advertising Research,pp. 313-320
Kim, J. Bae, M. Hastak, 2018, Emergency information diffusion on online social media during storm Cindy in US. International Journal of Information Management, pp. 153-165