Social media marketing in sports media: from a secondary distribution channel to an independent communication tool

Section: New Media

This article presents the first attempt to study the evolution of sports media’s activities with their content in social networks. The great majority of studies that have addressed the issue of media activity in social networks either contain irrelevant theses about the traffic generation function or state the rise of SMM as an important communication tool, but without specifying how and when exactly this happened. The author analysed the communities of the largest Russian online sports media ‘Championat.com’ and ‘Sports.ru’ in ‘VKontakte’ in the period from the creation of the groups (2011-2012) to 2024 – during this time they published 545,453 posts. The changes in content described year by year allow us to conclude that the only original purpose of the media’s activity in social networks was to redirect users to the main website, but now it is becoming irrelevant and fading away. Instead, SMM has acquired a number of new functions, becoming not only a tool for content distribution, but also an important tool of communication between the media as a brand and the audience, coverage of its non-journalistic projects, and a source of additional advertising revenue for the media as a business.

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To cite this article: Shvykov D. O. (2025) SMM v sportivnykh SMI: ot vtorostepennogo kanala rasprostraneniya kontenta do samostoyatel’nogo instrumenta kommunikatsii [Social media marketing in sports media: from a secondary distribution channel to an independent communication tool]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriya 10. Zhurnalistika 4: 96–120. DOI: 10.55959/msu.vestnik.journ.4.2025.96120