How social media has influence sport communication.
Nowadays, social media has substantially altered how people watch and enjoy sports. In order to dig deeper into how platforms like Instagram, TikTok or YouTube affect sports communication, along with athletes’ branding and audiences, I have created a podcast called “Beyond the Court” for this task. Moreover, the goal of this project is also to use my social media portfolio to demonstrate my personal branding, media-making and professional communication abilities.
Contents on action.
“Beyond the Court” illustrates that the majority of interactions with sports now take place on social media platforms or private campaigns rather than television broadcasts or newspapers. Moreover, there are many diverse types of communications for fans to engage, such as highlights, edits or controversial content, rather than just watching the game itself. Therefore, sport is now rapidly shared, consumed and watched thanks to social media. Athletes become the main influence on social media, which not only helps themselves but also allows admirers to get an authentic experience through the screen. However, social media also has its bad effects on audiences and athletes, such as a low attention span or a toxic environment.
I have narrowed down my research, focusing on those 3 topics, after researching and reading journal articles. According to Sutherland, I can establish myself as an authority on that specific niche subject by providing my audience with a variety of carefully chosen content. Therefore, as I approached this task as a professional communication project, my main goal for the 3 Instagram posts was to demonstrate how innovative digital content can draw the attention of sports fandoms, athlete influencers, and audiences. In addition, my post usually features bright and colourful themes as bold colors can draw the viewer’s attention and stop them from scrolling through social media, as posts with a visual component are said to get 94% more views on social media (Popovic, 2023 as cited in Sutherland, 2024).
These embedded Instagram posts below and broadcast on top of the blog illustrate my ways of promoting my own broadcast and also to spread awareness about the influence of sports culture and social media combined.
Reflection and moving ahead.
While doing this project, I discovered that making content for Instagram is far more challenging than it looks. Even though the finished look of my podcast and Instagram post might seem a bit simple, a lot of choices about fonts, images and colors had to be made. I wanted the overall project theme to be creative and professional while still presenting my personalities and styles.
Moreover, I found the podcast even harder than creating posts on Instagram. Speaking naturally while still pointing out key points and stating academic resources is definitely one of the biggest challenges. This requires me to balance between professionalism and authenticity, which made me really admire podcasters and influencers who are able to speak smoothly with confidence while still catching the audience’s ears.
In the near future, I would definitely make myself engage more in these kinds of projects that ask for sophisticated editing and also expand to interactive social media like polls, Q&A or reels. I would also try to dig into other sports rather than just sticking to basketball.
Overall, this project improved my knowledge of social media branding and podcast production while still focusing on my passion for sports, especially basketball.
REFERENCE LIST
Sutherland K. E. (2024). Ethical Content Curation. Strategic social media management: theory and practice (2nd ed.), p.279. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sutherland K. E. (2024). Creating Compelling Images, Graphics, Memes, Filters and Infographics. Strategic social media management: theory and practice (2nd ed.), p.500. Palgrave Macmillan.
SOCIAL MEDIA CREDITS
All pictures, videos and logos were created by Jasmine Do (me)
JASMINE DO | PORTFOLIO 