Sports Influencers on Twitter. Analysis and Comparative Study of Track Cycling World Cups 2016 and 2018

Abstract

Social media has driven a sea change in the way users view and participate in sporting events through the media. In the digital medium, identifying the profiles with the greatest influential capacity is a key issue. Using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), the aim of our research was to identify the most influential Twitter accounts in a major sporting event: The Track Cycling World Cups. The competitions from the years 2016 and 2018 were analysed, downloading all the tweets that included the official hashtag of each event and drawing up the graph of mentions and retweets. After reviewing the literature, activity, authority and popularity were defined as dimensions to assess influence, and two subcriteria were chosen as measures for each of them. Activity was measured by number of tweets and outdegree, authority by retweets and PageRank, and popularity by number of followers and indegree. By consulting experts following the AHP approach, various weights were assigned to these measures, resulting in authority as the most influential. With this weighting, the accounts with the greatest influence on Twitter turned out to be those related to organisation of the event and those of the athletes taking part.

Keywords

• influence
• influencers
• Twitter
• social network analysis (SNA)
• analytical hierarchy process (AHP)