Using social media of Instagram as personal brand management tool for professional athletes

Instagram has increasingly become a tool for sharing visual content for professional athletes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to use Instagram as a personal brand management tool for professional athletes. The method of qualitative research was quantitative content analysis. 472 Instagram posts of two professional footballers (Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi) were analyzed, in which the photos were categorized based on product-related and non-product-related attributes. Statistical analysis included analyzing the content of Instagram posts and examining the number of likes and comments on the athletes' Instagram page. The findings showed; for both athletes, posts with non-product-related features were significantly more shared than posts with product-related features on Instagram. The number of likes on posts with product-related attributes was significantly higher than the number of likes on posts with non-product-related features for both athletes. Also, the number of comments in posts with product-unrelated attributes content was significantly higher than the number of comments in product-related attributes posts for both athletes. This study shows that Instagram facilitates the understanding of how fans engage and interact with posts related to athlete brand attributes, and fans can play a more active role in the athlete brand building process through likes and comments. Based on this, it is suggested that professional athletes should have a greater understanding of the semiotics of images for posts in order to increase the number of comments and likes of their fans.