There are many different reasons as to why people use social media.
Motivations for using social media live at sporting events, such as Tweeting and tagging their favourite athlete or “checking-in” on Facebook, now seems to be an integral part of being at a sporting event. The way in which people use social media at these types of events may be different due to their social upbringing and the sub culture they find themselves in, as well as their values and beliefs, however these motives are always changing. (Kirschner, Corbalan, and Kester, 2011). There is a new phenomenon of letting people know where you are and if you are attending a sporting event such as the Olympic Games – the idea of “sharing” what you are experiencing at such an event is so attractive now that almost everyone does it.
However, on the other side of this, people use social media to experience sporting events when they aren’t present for example to see live results on their twitter feed, to watch live video streaming online. The blow screen shot shows the Top 10 sporting event trends on twitter in 2014. (Sedghi, 2014). “People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase (no spaces) in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search.” (Twitter, 2014)
References
Kirschner, F., Corbalan, G. and Kester, L. (eds.) (2011) Computers in Human Behaviour
PEDERSEN, S. (2010). Why blog? Motivations for blogging.
MILLER, V. (2011). Understanding Digital Culture. Sage
Sedghi, A. (2014) How sport dominated social media in 2014. (Online) Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/dec/10/how-sport-dominated-social-media-in-2014 (Accessed: 29 April 2015)
Twitter, (2014) Using Hashtags on Twitter. (Online) Available at: https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-using-hashtags-on-twitter (Accessed: 29 April 2015)
Sporting Events And Digital Media 