Soccer and Twitter: virtual brand community engagement practices

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify how consumer engagement practices shape the dynamics of a soccer club virtual brand community. Design/methodology/approach: A netnographic approach was employed. Using a Python script, more than 7,000 tweets about São Paulo FC soccer club on Twitter were collected and analyzed using the Virtual Brand Community Engagement Practices typology. Findings: The dynamics of engagement relies on two types of practices: those that comprise the actions of tweeting, retweeting, replying to, mentioning and liking messages from and about the São Paulo FC soccer club profile and those derived from the proposition of Hollebeek et al. (2017). Given the dynamics of Twitter, some practices have performed differently than the original proposal, resulting in a slight adaptation of the framework. Research limitations/implications: Given the length and the netnographic nature of this study, its findings should be considered exploratory. Future studies can build upon the ideas presented here by researching different contexts and focal objects of engagement. Practical implications: This paper provides the refinement of social media strategies and content development to make them more efficient and to establish a relevant communication channel with audiences. This knowledge can contribute to a better understanding of goals and metrics. Originality/value: This paper is based on the behavioral nature of engagement in virtual brand communities, which is an increasing topic of interest. To date, few studies have examined online engagement using a practice approach specifically in the sports marketing context.