Which motivations lead football fans to engage with the team on Instagram? A quantitative research

Football is arguably the most popular sport worldwide. The reason is that football fans are developing unique, long-term relationships with their favourite team. As a result, the football industry is generating massive revenues annually. Football teams have transformed into quasi-brands exploiting their brand name. However, up to this point, research is scarce regarding football fans engagement on Instagram. Instagram is a dynamic social media platform that in recent years has transformed into a particularly promising marketing tool. There is a lack of research on how football fans engage in their favourite football team’s Instagram and the underlying motivations leading to engagement. This study attempted to contribute to the limited literature, regarding engagement on social media in the sport context from the fans’ perspective, by revealing the ways football fans engagement is realized in Instagram and the motivations leading to it, paving the way for future research. The research question developed was: “Which motivations lead football fans to engage with the team on Instagram?” The motivations leading football fans to engage with their favourite football team were based on Uses and Gratifications theory and the three types of engagement were based on the Consumers’ Online Brand-Related Activities framework. The research method that was chosen to investigate the research question is quantitative, in the form of a survey that was distributed online through Qualtrics. The data from the questionnaire was later analyzed with SPSS to test the model attempting to explain which motivations lead to each level of engagement. The main finding of the study is that engagement in Instagram was found to happen in its own particular way. Thus, three new levels of engagement were developed, namely Light, Considerable and Deep, to measure accurately Instagram engagement. The motivations, that results have shown to influence Instagram engagement, are Empowerment, Brand Love, Integration and Social Interaction and Remuneration. Specifically, Brand Love and Integration and Social Interaction were responsible for Light engagement, Empowerment and Remuneration were responsible for Considerable engagement and Empowerment and Brand Love were responsible for Deep engagement. The conclusion is that engagement is realized in different ways on each social media platform. Research needs to further investigate football fans engagement in social media to better understand football fans’ behaviour. Sports marketers must attempt to stimulate the motivations that seem to work in each social media platform to drive engagement and create firm long-term relationships between football fans and football teams.