Social Network Analysis of Stakeholders in Major Sports Events: A Study on the Rio 2016 Olympics and the Tokyo 2020

With the advent of social media, social networks have also emerged as one of the newest management topics. Social networks play an essential role in promoting and circulating information in major sporting events. Concerning this, the purpose of this study is to investigate and compare how to promote the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games on social media. The social network analysis approach used to examine the Games Promotion Network, for which all the tweets of the official page of the two Olympics extracted from Twitter. 2256 tweets obtained from the official page of the Rio Olympics and 3287 tweets from the official page of the Tokyo Olympics, which finally included 436 tweets from the Rio and 905 tweets from Tokyo. Findings showed that athletes were more numerous in both Olympics than other stakeholders regarding the number of actors in the network. At the same time, the communication weight of international sports organizations has been greater than that of other stakeholders. The present study showed that it is impossible to promote a sporting event on social media without employing multiple stakeholders. However, depending on the purpose of the sport and organizations, their pattern for brand or event promotion can be unique.