Determining of social marketing effect on behavior of a sports event fans

Marketers, especially sports marketers, considering the integration of societies and the rapid development of social media, understand the importance of social media as a strong marketing tool and use these media to communicate with their customers. Therefore, the aim of this research is to determine the effect of social media marketing on the behavior of sport events fans. This research has been done with a survey method in terms of practical purpose. The statistical population of the present study included teachers and students of physical education who were members of fan pages for teams and sport events, and for data collection, according to Morgan's table, 384 questionnaires were distributed online among the available samples. The data was collected using the theory of planned behavior questionnaire, whose validity was confirmed by experts and its reliability by Cronbach's alpha method (86 percent). The results of the hypotheses test, using SPSS software, show that the fans' attitude did not have a positive and significant effect on their sport events behavior. But the positive and significant relationship of enjoyed pleasure, mental norms, perceived behavioral control, with the behavioral intention of fans of a sport events, based on the use of social media marketing, was confirmed.