99SYN14528_SocialSportsFanDoc-V2

As fanship grows, so does total time spent
on sport based social media
1.1 Insatiable social animals
Let’s just put this one to bed: Millennial sports fans love social media. No surprises there.
But there’s more to it than that. The bigger the sports fan, the more time they
spend on social in general… and the more of this time is devoted to sport.
3.5
3
2.5
Time on
social media
Time on
sport based
social media
Throughout this research we cut our findings across ‘Small Fans’, ‘Average Fans’
and ‘Massive Fans’. And also by male and female.
Male Massive Fans report spending 2.5 hours on social media a day, with
72% of that time on sports content. This is compared to female Small Fans who
spend the same number of hours a day on social, but with only 21% devoted to sport.
Hours/Day
2
1.5
1
0.5
This is clearly an opportunity for great traction. But do brands and rights holders
really make the most of it? Let’s dig deeper…
0
21% 21% 38% 41% 53% 72%
FEMALE
MALE FEMALE MALE FEMALE MALE
SMALL
FAN
AVERAGE
FAN
Level of Fanship/Gender
MASSIVE
FAN
“The main social media I probably
use is YouTube, and from there you
find names, and that leads you to
Twitter, and then they’ll probably
advertise their Facebook and then
you’ll be linked back round to
YouTube to see more videos.
– Robin, dancer.
“
In order to understand sports fans’ usage of social
media, we first need to look at how long they spend
on it. Respondents were asked to estimate how
many hours per day they spend on social media,
both for general use and specifically for sport.
By cross-tabulating these results
against their level of fanship, not only do we see
that the larger sports fans use social media
more in general per day, but they also spend a
greater amount of that time consuming sport-based
social content: overall, 64% of massive fans’ social
media usage was devoted to sport.
Interestingly, when delving deeper into the data
and looking at gender-specific findings, we found
that on average male sports fans spend 22% more
of their total social media time on sport than
female fans. This gender split becomes even more
visible when fanship is taken into consideration,
with ‘massive’ male fans spending 72% of their
social media time on sporting content, compared
to just 53% for female massive fans. Although these
are perhaps predictable findings, they help to support
the notion that sports fans’ interest levels are reflected
in their usage. Furthermore it cements the importance
of massive fans, particularly males, as a valuable
audience for sponsors.
Male Massive
Sports Fans spend
72% of their social
media time on sportbased
content