Social Sports

In more recent years, Sports teams throughout the nation have been using Social Media for many different reasons. They use their Social Media's to get fans involved, notify them about events or games and keep them informed about everything that take place within their fandom community. During games, some teams will have Twitter or Instagram contests that will increase fan involvement with their team during the game, or between period, whether it be trivia and you have to tweet the answer, or posting a picture tagging the team's handle and hashtagging the picture.

Many athletes have their personal Instagram's or Twitter's in which fans follow. With these the fans are sometimes able to communicate with their favorite players to either just express their admiration or ask questions about teams! Athletes sometimes use their social medias to update fans on their training, their retirements, their progress, or even if they've been traded. Sometimes when an athlete posts a picture of themselves training on Instagram it shows the players commitment to the game and team, which fuels the pride in the team and players. With the use of Social Media teams are able to post real-time pictures and videos of highlights or players to keep fans, but follow the team, that maybe can't watch on the game on tv informed with what is going on, or even just keep them updated scores of games or injury updates of players.

At times teams and athletes use Twitter to talk to each other, to show things their players are up to, to update fans about new players, drafts and trades. At times even teams will tweet back and forth to each other. When the Chargers moved to LA they tweeted their new team logo and when it went public the Tampa Bay Lightning tweeted at the LA Dodgers about the new LA Chargers logo looking similar to the two of their current logos combined. Fans feed into this, especially because of the humor, and because they think it is interesting that teams from two opposite ends of the country, and not even the same sport, would tweet back and forth to each other.



The New York Yankees have been utilizing Instagram to countdown until opening day in a creative way, by using pictures of retired players with single digit number jerseys, on the field playing to generate excitement for the beginning of the new season. A lot of the time excitement of the fans is what motivates the players to play to the best of their ability and hopefully at the end of the season win the championship.