Social Network Analysis of Stakeholders in Major Sports Events: A Study on the Rio 2016 Olympics & the Tokyo 2020

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Ph.D. in Sport Management, Faculty of humanities, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran

2 Assistant Prof. in Department of Sport Science, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran

3 Assistant Prof. in Department of Computer, Faculty of Statistic, Mathematic & Computer, Allame Tabataba’i University, Tehran

Abstract

With the advent of social media, social networks have also emerged as one of the most unexplored management topics. Social networks play an essential role in promoting & circulating information in major sporting events. Concerning this, the purpose of this study is to investigate & compare how to promote the Rio 2016 & Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games on social media. The social network analysis approach was used to examine the Games Promotion Network, for which all the tweets of the official page of the two Olympics were extracted from Twitter. Two thousand two hundred fifty-six tweets were obtained from the official page of the Rio Olympics & 3287 tweets from the official page of the Tokyo Olympics, which finally included 436 tweets from the Rio & 905 tweets from Tokyo. Findings showed that athletes were more numerous in both Olympics than other stakeholders regarding the number of actors in the network. At the same time, the communication weight of international sports organizations has been greater than that of other stakeholders. The present study showed that it is impossible to promote a sporting event on social media without employing multiple stakeholders. However, depending on the purpose of the 

Keywords

References

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History

  • Receive Date: 26 December 2021
  • Revise Date: 26 January 2022
  • Accept Date: 25 February 2022

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