The Power of Self-Promotion : Twitter Followers and Guaranteed Purses in Professional Boxing, 2011-2013

The social media phenomenon has provided tremendous opportunities for self-promotion. From global pop star, Psy, reaching over 1.2 billion YouTube viewers (as of this writing) with his smash hit, “Gangnam Style” to recent college graduates “getting themselves out there” in the job market via Linkedin and Monster, the opportunities for greater self-actualization for the upwardly-mobile appear endless. Professional boxers have been savvy to ride the social media gravy train through a number of outlets. This study will focus on professional boxers' use of one of these outlets, Twitter, as a determinant of their guaranteed purse for fights taking place over the period 2011-2013. As only the third study to utilize a multivariate regression in modeling the determinants of real-world purse data for professional boxers (Balbien, J., Noll, R. & Quirk, J., 1981; Chaplin, 2012a), this study contributes to an underdeveloped segment (that of the economics of professional boxing) of the ever-expanding sports economics field and analyzes the link between social media popularity and sport-specific pay in a way heretofore unexplored