| With the rapid development of mobile Internet technology,brand communication through social media has become an important marketing tool for professional sports clubs around the world.Among them,Weibo,a social media platform with wide influence in China,has not only built a bridge and interactive link between professional teams and their Weibo fans worldwide,but also become an important vehicle for teams to manage their fan relationship.Through online gathering,discussion and sharing behavior,fans gain a sense of fan identity and realize the value co-creation between them and professional teams.This relationship,which goes beyond transaction and purchase behavior,is defined as fan engagement behavior.It is important for professional teams to understand the basic connotation and dimensional composition of microblog fan engagement behavior and precisely locate the basic needs of microblog fans for microblog marketing.However,the measurement of microblog fan engagement behavior is still lagging behind in academic circles,and the mechanism between fan engagement behavior and team loyalty is still unclear.Based on this,this study takes professional teams in Chinese context as the research object,explores the connotation and dimensions of professional teams’ microblog fan engagement behavior,and constructs a localized scale of fan engagement behavior;on this basis,a theoretical model with microblog fan engagement behavior as the independent variable,team loyalty as the dependent variable,and team identity and fan activity participation as the moderating variables is constructed,and the influence mechanism of fan engagement behavior on team loyalty is explored through structural equation modeling.This study drew on relevant domestic and international scales,focus group interviews,expert validity CVI and pre-survey data reliability analysis to form a formal questionnaire combined with the actual situation of professional team microblog fans’ engagement.A convenience sampling method was used to survey professional team microblog fans through the distribution of online questionnaires,and a total of 491 valid questionnaires were collected.Finally,the descriptive statistical analysis,structural equation modeling analysis and moderating effect analysis of the data were conducted by SPSS 25.0 and Smart PLS 3.3.2 software,respectively.The results of the study showed that: professional team Weibo fan engagement behavior is a reflective-formative second-order measurement model that includes consumption,contribution and creation behaviors;fan engagement behavior has a positive and significant effect on team loyalty(behavioral and attitudinal loyalty).Fan activity participation plays a moderating role in the relationship between fan engagement behavior and team loyalty;team identity does not play a moderating role in the relationship between fan engagement behavior and team loyalty.The following management and marketing suggestions are proposed for the managers of professional teams’ microblogs:(1)Explore potential users and attract fans’ attention.(2)Enrich the content of blog posts to increase interaction opportunities.(3)Identify fans’ needs and realize emotional value.(4)Differentiate marketing and enrich fan activities.Research limitations and subsequent perspectives:(1)There are many types of contemporary social media with different functions and characteristics.Based on this study,subsequent studies can continue to examine the fan engagement behavior of other types of social media(We Chat Public,Knowing Football,Tiger App,and short video platforms)to verify and compare their similarities and differences,and then expand the scope of application of the scale.(2)It is recommended that subsequent scholars use this scale as the basis for in-depth multivariate causality studies with fan engagement behavior as the core variable,and explore the antecedent and outcome variables of fan engagement behavior,so as to further enrich the theoretical system of fan engagement behavior in the Chinese local context. |
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