Enthusiastic Fandom:

Analyzing Tweets of Professional Baseball Fans

Abstract

Loyal customers of power brands often involve “enthusiastic” or “fanatic” fans. To explore the reasons why such behaviors are sustained, we focused on professional baseball since it is a typical area where enthusiastic fans appear. An effective way to grasp social interactions affecting enthusiasm as a collective behavior is to analyze fans’ communication in social media. Accordingly, we collected tweets on each team in Nippon Professional Baseball in 2018 from Twitter and measured the frequency of posting and the level of positive and negative emotions. We examined how these factors are influenced by the performance in each game and the likelihood of success in the season. We also analyzed instantaneous synchronization of tweets and retweets by fans during a game as a burst phenomenon. These analyses allowed an understanding of how fans’ enthusiasm changes on two time scales, short-term and long-term, and offer some suggestions for building and retaining fandom.