Exploring Fans’ Social Media Engagement in National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball: A Consumer Culture Theory Perspective

Q: What does this research mean for the field?

While NBA and MLB fans share common social media engagement themes during playoffs, they exhibit distinct, league-specific discussion priorities—such as betting for the NBA and collectibles for MLB—that reflect unique meaning-making processes within consumer culture theory. Novelty: ClaimNovelty.INCREMENTAL. Consensus alignment: ConsensusAlignment.SUPPORTS_CONSENSUS.

Shu-Hao Chang; Yong Jae Ko

doi:10.1177/10616934261484564

September 4, 2026Sport Marketing Quarterly

Exploring Fans’ Social Media Engagement in National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball: A Consumer Culture Theory Perspective

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Key Points

To investigate social media fan engagement patterns and identify shared versus league-specific discussion themes during the NBA Playoffs and MLB Postseason.
Extracted and examined a dataset of 38,585 fan-generated posts from X (Twitter) published during championship events.
Utilized BERTopic modeling algorithms to extract latent thematic structures and categorize online fan discourse across both leagues.
Both leagues shared common core themes, including emotional reactions to game outcomes, collective cheering, championship speculation, in-game updates, and player-centered narratives.
NBA discussions uniquely emphasized sports betting and predictions, individual player performance analyses, highlight reels, and event-oriented chatter.
MLB discussions uniquely featured memorabilia and trading cards, historical league references, in-depth gameplay scoring, tactical lineup debates, and traditional rally slogans.

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Implication

Computational analysis reveals distinct league-specific discussion themes among online sports fans, indicating divergent community meaning-making during championship tournaments.

Abstract

This study explored fan engagement patterns and league-specific discussion themes on X (Twitter) during the National Basketball Association (NBA) Playoffs and Major League Baseball (MLB) Postseason. Using BERTopic topic modeling, 38,585 fan-generated tweets were analyzed to examine how online fan communities structured playoff-related discussions. The findings revealed several shared themes, including fan emotional response to game outcomes, fan community support, collective cheering, championship talk, in-game updates, and player-centered narratives. The two leagues also exhibited distinct topic structures. NBA discourse placed greater emphasis on betting and prediction-related topics, player performance analysis, highlights, and event-oriented chatter, while MLB discourse was characterized by collectibles and trading cards, historical references, gameplay and scoring, lineup discussion, and rally slogans. The study supports and extends consumer culture theory and online brand community identification by showing how digitally mediated fan communities across leagues may prioritize different discussion topics as part of league-specific meaning-making during high-stakes competition.

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Chang et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a9d1e3328139818eab20e3d https://doi.org/10.1177/10616934261484564

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Exploring Fans’ Social Media Engagement in National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball: A Consumer Culture Theory Perspective

Key Points

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Implication

Abstract

Discussion

Cite This Study

Exploring Fans’ Social Media Engagement in National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball: A Consumer Culture Theory Perspective

Key Points

Ask about this paper

Implication

Abstract

Discussion

Cite This Study

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