Social media has an impact on everything that we do, from the way that we talk to our friends, to the way that connect with brands and research companies online.
Today, social media even has an impact on the sporting industry. This includes how players and sports stars connect with their fans, how sports companies share news and products and how we can view sport goods online.
It is now all but impossible to scroll down your social media feed and not see some sort of sports related post, whether it is a video on a sporting event or a company advertising their wares.
BettingSites shows us in more details how social media has a growing impact on sports. For example, we can see that Ronaldo is an extremely popular player on all forms of social media. He is the only male sports star to have over 100 million followers on Instagram, and just one post in 2016 on Facebook was liked 1.7 million times.
For sporting brands, this merge over to social media can only be a good thing. Companies like Nike utilize these channels to advertise their brands, often using sporting stars to endorse their goods. If fans see a player wearing a particular brand, then they are more likely to want to wear that brand as well.
Ronaldo’s social media channels alone generate over $500 million a year for Nike. He was the third athlete to sign a lifetime deal with the brand, although he has been sponsored by Nike since 2003.
Throughout that time, he has worn more than 60 different versions on Nike’s Mercurial soccer cleats. Social media has played a vital part in making this form of advertising so successful and is likely to continue to be that way in the future.