Sports television programmes and their relationship with the social audience on Twitter in Spain

Abstract

This study presents an analysis of the relationship between viewers of sports TV programmes and Twitter users in Spain. Methods: The research is based on a quantitative method that involves the analysis of a sample of 150 TV programmes that made it to the top five most-discussed TV programmes of the day in Twitter (during a month). Together, these programmes attracted a total of 1,838,056 Twitter users. The quantitative comparative analysis and the Pearson’s correlation coefficient were used to test three research hypotheses. Results and conclusions: Sports TV programmes are discussed by 34.8% of the sample of Twitter users: the sports TV programmes that are the most popular on Twitter are not the most watched on traditional TV; the percentage of interaction on Twitter around sports TV programmes is still very low in quantitative terms in comparison to these programmes’ TV viewers.