Tweeting Strategies by Spanish TV Football Shows

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is David Puertas Graell, who shifts our focus to the use of social media in Spanish sporting journalism. Such journalism is an important part of the contemporary media environment, and has a very large mainstream and social media audience, but remains substantially underresearched.

In Spain, there is a substantial media ecology for sports media, focussed especially on football; many such media outlets are now also present on Twitter. This makes it possible to study transmedia patterns between these mainstream and social media channels, and the present project has investigated a number of popular TV shows that cover football.

The study examined some 8,000 tweets around these shows, and found significant differences in the volume of activity around them. It coded the content of these tweets, in particular to distinguish between referential and conversational tweeting styles – and again there are substantial differences in their tweeting strategies.

Some shows engaged in highly self-referential tweeting practices; some both posted headlines and engaged with other users; others focussed mainly on engagement with others. Many invited followers to watch the shows, of course, and some also ran Twitter polls to generate more engagement.

What emerges from this are two broad models: one that is ‘self-conclusive’ or inwardly focussed on the show only, and one that embeds the show in the broader continuum of TV and social media and therefore takes a more transmedia approach.