Marina Bagić Babac and Vedran Podobnik
Due to an immense rise of social media in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate who, how and why participates in creating content at football websites…
Abstract
Purpose
Due to an immense rise of social media in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate who, how and why participates in creating content at football websites. Specifically, it provides a sentiment analysis of user comments from gender perspective, i.e. how differently men and women write about football. The analysis is based on user comments published on Facebook pages of the top five 2015-2016 Premier League football clubs during the 1st and the 19th week of the season.
Design/methodology/approach
This analysis uses a data collection via social media website and a sentiment analysis of the collected data.
Findings
Results show certain unexpected similarities in social media activities between male and female football fans. A comparison of the user comments from Facebook pages of the top five 2015-2016 Premier League football clubs revealed that men and women similarly express hard emotions such as anger or fear, while there is a significant difference in expressing soft emotions such as joy or sadness.
Originality/value
This paper provides an original insight into qualitative content analysis of male and female comments published at social media websites of the top five Premier League football clubs during the 1st and the 19th week of the 2015-2016 season.
Details
Keywords
Marina Bagić Babac and Vedran Podobnik
Due to the significant rise in the use of social media in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate who, how and why participates in creating content at political…
Abstract
Purpose
Due to the significant rise in the use of social media in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to investigate who, how and why participates in creating content at political social networking websites utilising a content analysis of posts and comments published on Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign in Croatia. It shows consequences of a transition from traditional to social media campaigns and the effectiveness of social media at activating and moving public opinion during the general election campaign.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses a data collection through a social media website, a classification of data set items by content attributes and a statistical analysis of the classified data.
Findings
Building on an empirical data set from Croatia, this study reveals that different political parties implement different election campaign strategies on social media to influence citizens who, consequently, respond differently to each of them. The results indicate that political messages with positive emotions evocate positive response from citizens, while neutral content is more likely to invoke negative comments and criticism, and support to the opponent. Another implication of the results is that two-way and tolerant communication of political actors increases citizen engagement, whereas unidirectional communication decreases it.
Originality/value
This paper provides an original insight into qualitative content analysis of posts and user comments published on Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign in Croatia.