Understanding the dynamics of social media in the sports landscape

Over the past two decades, social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok, have experienced a significant proliferation, revolutionizing the sports industry. Athletes, teams, event organizers, and fans have readily embraced these platforms to serve diverse purposes, such as news updates, live coverage, and sales. The continuous evolution of social media companies, introducing novel features like Facebook Live and Instagram Reels, reshapes global content creation, sharing, and consumption. The unique attributes of social media, such as its seamless networking, instant global reach, absence of gatekeeping, and facilitation of collaboration, render it a potent and versatile tool. This essay adopts the definition of social media as "online resources open to the public (e.g., blogs, social networks, content communities, and discussion sites) that people use primarily to share content (e.g., text, photos, audio files, and videos) and engage in multi-way conversations on Internet applications (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).