Cross-sectional survey reveals athlete brand image influences fan intention to follow on Instagram, highlighting social media impact.
Social media has shifted the way sports fans look at athletes and sports teams. The attachment between sports fans and athletes or sports teams involves the brand image built by athletes and sports teams in the media. The number of followers on an athlete's Instagram account indicates a certain brand image value that can be an asset for an athlete, team and sponsor. This study determines the features of Instagram as a social media and the form of athlete brand image associated with fans' intention to follow athletes' Instagram accounts, and conducted a cross-sectional online survey of 1477 respondents by distributing a Google Form link on several sports community WhatsApp groups. Evaluation of the structural and measurement models was carried out using PLS-SEM to answer several hypotheses proposed in this study. The result shows athlete’s brand image (ABI) directly influences and can mediate the influence of Instagram social media characteristics on the fans’ intention to follow favourite athlete accounts. This study presents a theoretical contribution to the under-researched literature on ABI and strengthens the findings of several previous studies by highlighting the important role of athletic performance factors in creating ABI through Instagram.
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Hafiar et al. (2025) studied this question.
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