Running head: WHAT ARE THEY SAYING?

What are They Saying? When are They Listening?

A Case Study
Matthew Reiskytl and Dr. Emily Langan
Wheaton College, IL, USA
12 December 2019
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Abstract

Twitter has been on the rise in the sport world, and this study hoped to see how it is being used

and interacted with. There is a lot know about the use and interaction with Twitter within the

realm of sport, yet there remains much to explore. Using the Minnesota Timberwolves and

further generalizing, this case study looked at the ways teams, athletes, and reporters post on

Twitter and how fans engaged with these tweets. What are they saying? When are fans

engaging? 891 tweets were coded based on their content into specific categories developed by

Hambrick and Geurin-Eagleman. Statistical methods were used to analyze the tweets

collectively. The study concluded that there are significant differences in what is tweeted by

teams, athletes, and reporters and that timing is a very relevant factor when it comes to fan

engagement.

Keywords: Twitter, fan engagement, code, sport communication

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Literature Review

Since the birth of social media, sport fans of all kinds have been daily bombarded by information

through twitter. On average, 500 million small sets of words, known as “tweets,” were posted by

Twitter’s users in 2019. Obviously, not all of these came from sports teams, athletes, and

reporters. However, a very large number of them were coming from sport related entities. All of

the internet has become more and more over-saturated with information. Twitter has not been an

exception. Sport fans, however, have chosen their own fate, showing that they enjoyed this

bombardment, as it allowed them to easily and more thoroughly keep up with their teams and

sports of choice.

From these sport related accounts that fans have subscribed to, different forms of content

have been sent out to them. However, there have been so many tweets, that the only way in

which to study them should be in terms of the conglomerate, as literally everything the human

mind can fathom has probably already been tweeted. Generally, tweets have contained either

text-based or visual content. Different people, such as Hambrick and Geurin-Eagleman, have

created subcategories within textual (Hambrick 2010) and visual content (Geurin-Eagleman

2016) in which to further categorize these tweets in order to systematically make sense of them

all. These subcategories will be further explained in the methods section.

Without proceeding any further, some unclear terms need to be defined. Starting at the

most basic level, Twitter is a social media platform in which users post small bits of words or

pictures. Twitter has developed into the dominant source for the spread of sport-related

information on the internet. A tweet, to reiterate, is the thing that is posted on Twitter, whether it

contains a link, a picture, or just words. Fan engagement, or just engagement for short, is the

total of likes, comments, and retweets of a tweet. To engage with a tweet would be to either like
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a tweet, comment on a tweet, or retweet a tweet. A beat reporter, often referred to later as just

‘reporter,’ is the main, or leading reporter for a specific team or city. In this case, Jon

Krawcynski is the beat reporter who’s tweets we are studying, although he reports on both the

Minnesota Timberwolves and the Minnesota Vikings franchises.

Ann Pegoraro, in her case study, studied the tweets of just athletes. She came to the

conclusion that some athletes have, in fact, taken to Twitter in order to increase pubic visibility

through engagement with fans and fellow athletes. She also noted that this growth in the use of

Twitter by athletes should spark new opportunities for the communication between athletes and

fans and the study thereof (Pegoraro 2010). The present study has continued this research in

seeking to discover if there exists a difference in how teams, athletes, and reporters tweet. The

present study has also drawn upon Hambrick and Geurin-Eagleman’s conclusions in order to

detect what these differences are, both textually and visually, should they exist. More

specifically, do the types of textual tweets of athletes, teams, and reporters significantly differ

from one another? And if so, how do they differ? Similarly, do the types of visual tweets of the

three account categories differ from one another? And if they do, how do these differ?

Upon reception of these millions of sport related tweets, sport fans have been left with a

choice. Just the same with any common tweet, a sports-related tweet can be engaged with or just

skimmed over. From the corporate side of sports, engagement has proven to be a very important

marker to keep track of. The maximizing of engagement allows sports teams to get more

advertising material past their followers faces, making them more money. At the lowest level,

this is simply game promotions and ticket sales but can be extrapolated further to sponsorship

deals and things of the like.

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The emergence of social media platforms in the US came with fear from sports teams on

the corporate level, thinking that these medias would take away from the tv and radio traffic

sports teams got. Furthermore, the reproduction of any sport related scene or picture became

illegal without the expressed, written consent of the league therein. King, however, discussed

the thoughts of Adam Ostrow, who believed this type of censoring to be counterproductive for

the teams (King 2009). In lieu of these somewhat uncommon opinions, social media has been

realized as a platform in which more money can be made by teams and athletes.

Pegoraro also concludes that “although fans follow these athletes in large numbers,

athletes are not capitalizing on this audience of consumers. Although Twitter is offering fans

unprecedented access to athletes, its potential as a marketing tool is not being realized by

athletes,” (Pegoraro 2010). This conclusion can easily be extrapolated to opportunity for team

accounts as well. However, the key to getting paid, from the team’s perspective, has proven to

be the mastering of engagement with Twitter followers.

There are many factors that contribute to fan engagement with tweets. Jan Boehmer

discovered some of these factors in relation to characteristics of fans, team entities, and the

messages themselves. Her study found that “one’s level of interest in a tweet’s exact topic, the

perceived relevance of the tweet, how similar the information contained in a tweet is to the user’s

personal opinion, and one’s perception of how a tweet would affect one’s followers are the user

characteristics that affect intentions to retweet,” (Boehmer 2015). These findings suggested that

dominating Twitter requires relevance and ‘correct’ opinions, but never mentions anything

relating to timing. The present study planned on continuing this discussion by studying the

timing of tweets. How does engagement change from non-gameday to gameday? Furthermore,

does the time of day at which a message is tweeted affect the amount of engagement?
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Methods

This study carefully followed and coded tweets from thirteen accounts relating to the Minnesota

Timberwolves of the National Basketball Association (NBA) for thirty days. The dates studied

were October 16 through November 14. These dates were chosen, due to the timing of the study,

in order to maximize the amount of days during the regular season of the NBA. The NBA

regular season started on October 22, hence twenty-four of the days of the study were within the

regular season. The accounts studied were the official team account @Timberwolves, the beat

reporter @ JonKrawcynski, and all of the rostered athletes who were active on twitter during the

30-day period (@JaylenNowell, @itsmclaughlin11, @jarrettc08, @1jordanbell, @TreBall21,

@GorguiDieng, @JLayman10, @CallMe_NonStop, @22wiggins, @KarlTowns, and

@Holla_At_Rob3). For the purpose of the study, the eleven athletes were grouped together, so

that the Team, athletes, and reporter could be studied individually.

In total, 891 tweets were studied in the 30-day period. Six pieces of data were

individually collected for each tweet. The first piece of data for each tweet was whether or not it

was tweeted on gameday or not. The second, contingent upon the first, was whether their team

won or lost on a gameday. Thirdly, the time of day the tweet was posted was noted. Next, the

total comments were noted. Following that, the added sum of likes and retweets was noted.

Lastly, the tweet was coded based upon its content, using the coding scheme of Hambrick for

textual content and the coding scheme of Geurin-Eagleman for visual content.

Hambrick’s scheme for coding text-based content is broken up into six categories based

purely upon what is said in each tweet. Within this scheme, a text-based tweet is grouped into

the following categories: Interactivity, Diversion, Information sharing, Content, Fanship, or

Promotional. Interactivity was the account’s direct communication with other athlete’s and fans.
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An example of this from the current study from Jordan McLaughlin (@itsmclaughlin11) was

tweeted on October 31: “Happy Halloween everyone be safe tonight.” This tweet is purely an

athlete communicating with his fans. The second category was Diversion. Tweets of this

category were non-sports related, discussing friends and family or personal interests, such as

video games, music, or fashion. An example of this from Karl-Anthony Towns (@KarlTowns)

on October 24 was “If you want to have a chance to win a copy of Call of Duty: Modern

Warfare Operator Edition, follow me on Twitter, IG, and join my discord community. I will be

dropping codes all week. Links are in my bio! #ModernWarfare.”

Thirdly was the code of Information sharing. This is essentially any insight into the team

or athlete being studied, such as details about practices or recent competitive results. An

example of this, tweeted on November 13 by the beat reporter (@JonKrawcynski) was “Teague

finishes with 18 points and 6 assists in 23 minutes. Towns: 28, 11r, 4 a. Wolves cruising to the

end here.” Content, a somewhat confusing title, was defined as any sort of link to pictures,

videos, and other websites. Another tweet by the beat reporter reads “The Timberwolves are

starting to solve the math problem that has plagued them for years.” This tweet was simply the

title of an article linked within the tweet on theathletic.com. This is an example of content as

defined by Hambrick.

Fanship, as defined in this study, were the accounts discussing sports other than their

own team or teammates. An example of this, tweeted by Jordan Bell (@1jordanbell) on

November 12, was “Good win @OrgeonMBB,” as he is referencing the Oregon men’s college

basketball team. The final category was Promotional, defined as publicity regarding

sponsorships, upcoming games, and any other promotions, such as giveaways or discounted
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tickets. Josh Okogie (@CallMe_NonStop) tweeted “Call these the nonstops,” with a link to the

Nike shoes he wears on October 21. This is an example of a Promotional tweet.

In this study, many primarily visual tweets were also studied. These were coded

similarly but with a different scheme. This one was developed by Geurin-Eagleman and codes

tweets of visual content into one of seven categories, purely off of what is shown in the image or

video. The categories within this scheme were Related to personal life, Related to business,

Related to athlete/team sport, Related to other sport of athlete, reposted photo, pop-culture of

landmark, and Meme/screen capture. The first category, Related to personal life, was defined as

visual content referencing lives, routine, weather, parties, charity, family, or friends. An

example of this is a video @KarlTowns posted on October 29 of someone dressed as Joker for

some sort of costume party. Secondly, related to business, was defined as photos or videos

referencing their business/work, including training, travel, games. In the case of this study, this

is everything basketball that is related to the Timberwolves. An example of this was the short

video posted by the official team account on November 13, showing a dunk in the fourth quarter.

Related to athlete/team sport was defined as photos referencing basketball, but not the

Timberwolves, such as any college or high school basketball reference or other NBA teams. An

example was the official Timberwolves account tweeting pictures of Paul Pierce in his Kansas

uniform. Related to other sport or athlete was defined photos focusing on another sport. An

example of this, again from @Timberwolves, was the picture posted on November 13 of Kyle

Rudolph, a Minnesota Vikings player. Reposted photo was simply defined as a photo posted

that is originally from someone else’s account. An example of this was Jaylen Nowell

(@JaylenNowell) reposting a photo that the Timberwolves team account had posted a few days

before, regarding NBA media day.

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Pop-culture or landmark tweets were defined as visual content that focus on movies, tv,

or landmarks/locations, and stem from shared cultural knowledge. An example was Karl-

Anthony Towns tweeting a video in which him and his teammates are running around

Philadelphia searching for cheesesteak before their game. Lastly, meme/screen capture, was

defined as any visual content that is not a photo or video. An example of this was the meme

posted by the Timberwolves of Kendrick Perkins turning up the thermostat on November 14.

Results

As aforementioned, thirteen accounts and a total of 891 tweets were studied. Of these tweets,

252 (28.28%) were tweeted on non-game days, as opposed to the 639 (71.72%) tweeted on game

days. 454 (50.95%) of them were tweeted by the official Timberwolves account, 89 (9.99%)

were tweeted by the athletes, and 348 (39.06%) were tweeted by the beat reporter of the

Timberwolves.

Research question 1A asked if the textual tweets of athletes, teams, and reporters differ

from one another based on their code in Hambrick’s coding scheme. A chi-square test was

performed to examine the relation between type of account and type of textual content. The

content was significantly different based on the type of the poster (X 2(10, 559) = 150.47, p < .00).

The two most common content types for the team to post were information sharing (n = 92,

62.2%) and interactive (n = 20, 13.5%), while the least common was content (n = 1, 0.7%). For

the athletes, the most common was interactive (n = 33, 46.5%), while the least common was

promotional (n = 3, 4.2%). For the beat reporter, the most common was information sharing

(n = 216, 63.5%), while the other categories each made up less than 12% within the reporter’s

tweets. The team and reporter included more information sharing than the athletes.
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Research question 1B asked if the visual content of tweets of athletes, teams, and

reporters differ from one another based on their code in Geurin-Eagleman’s coding scheme. A

chi-square test was performed to examine the relation between type of account poster and type

of visual content. The content was significantly different based on the type of the poster (X 2(12,

332) = 137.06, p < .00). For the team, the most common type of visual tweet was related to

business (n = 178, 58.2%), while every other category contained less than 15% of the team’s

tweets. For the reporter, the most common type was a repost (n = 6, 75%), with only 8 visual

based tweets in total. For the athletes, the most common type was a repost (n = 12, 66.7%). The

team included more visual content in total than the other types of accounts. The team included

more visual tweets related to business than the reporter and athletes, with 96.7% of them.

Research question 2A asked how engagement changed from non-gameday to gameday.

Results from a t-test indicate that there is a significant difference between gameday and non-

gameday in the amount of engagement with tweets. Non-gameday tweets received more

comments (x = 30.53, SD = 253.35) and likes and retweets (x = 1619.8, SD = 13621.76) than

gameday tweets comments (x = 8.28, SD = 14.5) and likes and retweets (x = 380.48, SD =

791.09), respectively (t889 = 2.21, p < .03), (t889 = 2.29, p < .03). Non-gameday tweets received

overall more engagement than gameday tweets.

Research question 2B asked how the time of day affects the amount of engagement with

tweets. There is a weak, negative correlation between comments and hour of the day, (r = -.12, p

< .01). There is a weak, negative correlation between likes and retweets and hour of the day, (r

= -.12, p < .00). There is slightly more engagement with tweets earlier in the day.

Discussion
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This study desired to uncover if teams, athletes, and reporters tweet differently and if the timing

of tweets affect their engagement. To summarize, teams, athletes, and reporters do, in fact,

tweet differently, both textually and visually. On the text-based side, teams and reporters

dominate the information sharing category, while athletes were more likely to produce

interactive tweets than any other category. This did not come as a surprise at all, as one would

expect teams and reporters to be sharing information on Twitter, as it is essentially the reason

they exist. This research agreed with Pegoraro’s research, as the opportunity for athletes to

interact more with fans was still a wide-open door (Pegoraro 2010). Interactivity was the

category most tweeted in for athletes, yet was still small, with only 33 tweets. Not only that, but

in the 30-day window, for all 11 athletes studied, only 3 total tweets were categorized as

promotional. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it suggest that these athletes in particular do

not care all that much about media attention. This also is not surprising, as these athletes play

for Minnesota, and upon viewing their gameplay, one can easily see that these athletes are not

out here trying to flex when they can just get it done in the right way. This brings up a limitation

of the research.

The Minnesota Timberwolves are not the Chicago Bulls or the LA Lakers. With zero

NBA finals experience and few historical superstars, it only takes one logical step to assume that

generally speaking, Minnesota’s players are not attention seekers on the whole. This is

definitely a limitation of this research. This is not to say that it would be inherently better to

study players with more media-attention, but that studying more than one team or choosing a

team that has more of a balance of players could benefit this research. Another possible, much

larger, future study could study players and teams league-wide, as opposed to simply on one

team, in order to get a more accurate balance on who the archetype NBA player is.
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Returning to the above thought, there exists such an opportunity for athletes to promote

themselves on Twitter for any reason, whether money or influence or a voice in the public. This

study once again pokes at that hole, wondering why athletes have not done so yet with all the

traffic on Twitter these days.

On the visual side of the coding process, the team account massively outweighed both the

reporter and the athletes in all categories, but specifically in related to business. This makes

complete and total sense. The team entity of the Timberwolves hires design professionals, social

media experts, and many others taking part in the tweets produced by the official team account.

They produce original content with the goal of having fans enjoy it. Not to mention how easy it

is to produce a five to ten second video of a play that just happened and in turn transforming the

Twitter feed into a highlight real. In the research phase of this study, the researchers noticed that

regardless of the day, the official was tweeting, and it was tweeting original visual content daily.

This could be just something that is a big part of the Timberwolves vision for their Twitter

account or it could be a reflection of a common league-wide practice. Within the current study

there is no way to tell. Once again, a limiting factor of this research is the fact that only one

team was studied, and a future study could include multiple teams.

Along with implications of the first research question comes the implications of the

second. The fact that engagement is significantly higher on days without games is actually quite

surprising. One may predict that fans are more likely to see and engage with tweets during

games. However, this straight up is not the case. Fans prefer to engage with tweets on non-

gamedays. This could be because of the type of tweets posted on gameday verses non-gameday.

For instance, it was much more likely in this study for the team to post a whole bunch of videos

while they are playing in a game. If a fan is watching the game, they may still see these tweets
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and may even very much enjoy their existence, but amidst the game they have no reason to

interact with these videos, as they are simply recaps of what they have already seen. Similarly,

if the fan is not able to watch the game and relies on Twitter to get their share of game action

and highlights, they will most likely simply scroll through them as there is a ton of content

posted on gamedays, not taking the time to stop and retweet or comment or like the tweets.

On the flip side, non-gamedays pose a less busy day for everyone involved. In this ‘free

time,’ without a game that evening, fans can reconcile spending more time on Twitter and

engaging with tweets. This disagrees with King’s article on not allowing the reproduction of

sport-related material on social media being counterproductive (King 2009), as the gameday

engagement levels suggest that this type of censorship would have a small effect.

Another possible reason for this is the massive variety of tweets’ engagement levels. The

researcher team noticed that there were just a few tweets that received thousands of likes, while

many, many more received little to no engagement. These anomaly tweets are outlaw-ish in

their behavior. Every once in a while, one of the accounts would post something spectacular,

generating massive engagement. Every time this happened was on a non-gameday. If these

outlaws are taken out of the equation, there would be much less of a discrepancy between

engagement levels on game day verses non-game day. This poses yet another possible limitation

of the current study. An option for future research fixing this problem would be to study tweets

for a longer period of time, as this would allow the law of large numbers to take affect and

balance out these anomaly tweets from having such a massive effect on the numbers.

Very similar implications can be inferred regarding the negative correlation between time

of day and engagement. NBA games tend to be in the evening, hence, all the above reasons for

fans not engaging during games apply here as well. Along with that, there seemed to be a trend
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for 11am being the first tweet of the day from both the team and the beat reporter. Furthermore,

the vast majority of the massively-engaged-with, anomaly tweets mentioned above were tweeted

somewhere between 11am and 1pm. This would therefore shift the engagement numbers to

earlier in the day. In addition, there were a handful of ‘rollover’ tweets that were tweeted after

11:59 pm on gameday, putting them at hour 0 of a non-gameday. It was often these tweets that

received the most engagement for gameday tweets, even thought they were not technically

tweeted on gameday. These tweets could have affected both the gameday/non-gameday

numbers as well as the time of day numbers, as a tweet during hour 0 receive one 1,000 likes

surely helps the likelihood for earlier hours’ tweets to receive high amounts of engagement.

This is a slight problem that could be fixed in future research by simply lying about the time

these tweets were tweeted, making them all be at 11:59pm on gameday.

In this study, the Minnesota Timberwolves, its players, and beat reporter’s tweets were

analyzed. It turns out that the athletes really have not tweeted all that much within the 30-day

period looked at. This implies that the athletes of the Timberwolves are not pursuers of the

Paparazzi. But the lack of athlete’s tweets was made up for by the volume of tweets from the

team and reporter who evidently do their jobs quite well. The Timberwolves official account

posted so much visual content that it is clear that this is what sport fans of today desire to see on

their twitter feed. Likewise, sport fans undoubtedly want to see this content on days that lack a

game for their team, and seemingly would like to view this content earlier rather than later in the

day. But then again, people are crazy and may shift their ideal scenario in just one short second.
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References

Boehmer, J., & Tandoc Jr., E. C. (2015). Why We Retweet: Factors Influencing Intentions to

Share Sport News on Twitter. International Journal Of Sport Communication, 8(2), 212-

232.

Geurin-Eagleman, A. N., & Burch, L. M. (2016). Communicating via photographs: A gendered

analysis of Olympic athletes’ visual self-presentation on Instagram. Sport Management

Review (Elsevier Science), 19(2), 133-145.

Hambrick, M. E., Simmons, J. M., Greenhalgh, G. P., & Greenwell, T. (2010). Understanding

Professional Athletes' Use of Twitter: A Content Analysis of Athlete Tweets.

International Journal Of Sport Communication, 3(4), 454-471.

King, D. (2009). Just Don't Twitter About the Ol' Ball Game. Information Today, 26(9), 39.

Pegoraro, A. (2010). Look Who’s Talking – Athletes on Twitter: A Case Study. International

Journal of Sport Communication, 3, 501-514.