User Characteristics of Olympic Gold Medallists on Instagram: A Quantitative Analysis of Rio2016

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine Olympic champions' characteristics on Instagram to first understand whether differences exist between male and female athletes and then to find possible correlations between these characteristics. We utilized a content analytic method to analyze Olympic gold medalists' photographs on Instagram. By this way we fetched data from Instagram pages of all those Rio2016 Olympic gold medalists who had their account publicly available. The analysis of data revealed the existence of a positive monotonic relationship between the ratio of following/follower and the ratio of engagement to follower for men gold medalists, and a strong negative monotonic relationship between age and ratio of self-presenting post of both men and women gold medalists which even take a linear form for men. These findings aligned with the relative theories and literature may come together to help the athletes to manage and expand their personal brand in social media.