Spring semester has been all about working on my capstone project. As I mentioned in a previous post, I will be
looking at how sports teams use social media to engage with their fans and build
their team’s brand for this project. For
the actual research portion of the project, I am doing a content analysis of
MLB team tweets during 2017. While the
topic is obviously very interesting to me, it is a little daunting to be in the
process of writing a 30+ page research paper.
I started this project in
the fall during my Communication Theory and Communication Research
classes. I wrote a literature review for
my final paper in theory and looked at the current literature about how and why
sports teams use social media. There is
no shortage of sources on the topic and that made writing the literature review
an easier process. I also wrote my research proposal on the same topic as what
my capstone project would be…a Twitter content analysis study of MLB team
tweets.
Already having a chunk of
my paper written at the beginning of this semester has given me more time to
work on gathering the data for the research portion of the project.
The first step of the research part was to collect
tweets from 2017 for all 30 teams. The
process was very tedious and I spent countless hours in the evenings and on the
weekends sitting in front of my computer gathering all these tweets.
Coding tweets has been
just as big of a task and just as tedious as collecting the tweets. I was hoping to be able to code tweets from
all 30 teams, but will probably only be able to code tweets from 8-10 teams
because of time constraints for the project.
I knew that teams were very active on social media, but I did not
realize how much they tweeted over the course of one year. Of the teams, that I have looked at, they have
each sent out between 5,000 – 12,000 tweets in one year. I am coding every 100th tweet, so
that has been a lot of tweets to go through and code!
To analyze these tweets, I created
a coding sheet that consists of different themes or content areas to look for
in each tweet. These questions range
from whether the tweet includes an image or video, how many likes/tweets/replies
each tweet gets and the general content of the tweet.
I had about 10-12 pages of
this project already written prior to this semester and have gone through a couple
of drafts already this semester. It has
been mostly adding on to what I already have written and editing it as I
go. My capstone professor has seen each
and every draft of this paper now since he was also my professor for both my research
and theory classes last semester.
The writing process for
this paper has been challenging for me. Every
time I sit down in front of my computer, I seem to get writers block and have a
hard time getting any writing done. But
as soon as I am doing something else, that’s when all my ideas come to me.
I am now down to crunch
time with this project with only about a month left of the semester. These last few weeks will be dedicated to
writing the results and discussion section and doing more editing and
re-writing of this project. Wish me
luck!
