Social Media Marketing on Facebook and Its Contribution to Sports Brands

This Bachelor thesis aims to evaluate the communication strategy on Facebook followed by major sports brands. More specifically, to construct a classification for posts, and identify which categories maintained the highest level of engagement. Furthermore, to provide a comparison of the purpose for each type of posts used to communicate with followers by the chosen major brands in the industry and assess the impact of these posts on the followers of the brands. A secondary aim of this bachelor thesis is to identify how these methods are affecting international Facebook users. Two research methods were used for conducting the bachelor thesis to collect data, the core research method, was an intensive content analysis on the last 100 posts published by each brand on their main worldwide Facebook page. The second research method was a less intensive focus group, it was used to collect general points of view from 9 participants. Among the findings of the second research is that participants are educated in business universities and have a gist of the sportswear industry. Apart from these findings, there are several observations related to the topic. These observations as well as findings from research pave the way for more extensive qualitative research of this phenomenon and gives the opportunity for the researcher to suggest recommendations for the communication of sports brands using Facebook.