Spanish Winter Olympic athlete’s communication on Instagram

Abstract

Social media have become an increasingly popular tool for athletes to share content with their followers. This study’s purpose was to contribute to the understanding of athlete communication on Instagram by focusing on the communication strategies of the Spanish Winter Olympic team during 2018, when the PyeongChang Olympic Games were held. Content analysis was performed on 990 Instagram posts collected through the Instagram Scraper tool, analysing a wide variety of data such as the number of likes and comments, the format of the publication, the use hashtags or the text of each post. The data was processed in Excel. Although the analysis is in process, some preliminary results can be provided. All the 13 athletes from the Spanish Olympic team who participated in the PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games use Instagram. His followers range from 1,413 by Imanol Rojoy to 259,432 by Javier Fernández. In 2018 they published on Instagram between 24 and 191 posts, a total of 990 contributions (90.61% of images and 9.39% of videos), which generated more than 2 and a half million likes and almost 40,000 comments. Findings from these preliminary results suggest that, in general, Instagram is revealed as an effective tool for Olympic athletes when it comes to generating visibility among their audiences and fan engagement increases during the celebration of an international mega event as the Olympic Winter Games.