How are major gambling brands using Twitter?

ABSTRACT

This paper is the first to compare how major gambling brands are using the popular social media platform Twitter, looking at how gambling brands vary in the frequency of their messages, the content of their tweets and engagement with their Twitter activity. 63,913 tweets were collected from seven well-known British gambling brands (Bet365, Betfair, Betfred, Coral, Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, William Hill) and their associated Twitter accounts (Total Number of Accounts = 22) via the Twitter Application Program Interface (API) on the 1 August 2018. Companies varied in their approach to Twitter, some posting from a single account whereas others segmented their tweets by topic or purpose. Frequency analysis of tweets showed that on average major gambling brands tweeted anywhere between 89 and 202 tweets a day. Sentiment analysis of tweets showed a positivity bias with the language in tweets being associated with positive emotions like anticipation, trust and joy. Paddy Power, Bet365 and Coral produced the content that received the highest number of likes or shares from other twitter users. This study highlights the extent to which companies are using Twitter; followers could potentially be receiving hundreds of messages per day.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• advertising
• gambling
• betting
• sports

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Compliance with ethical standards

This study was a secondary analysis of publically available data. For this type of study formal consent is not required.

Constraints on publishing

There were no constraints on publishing.

Additional information

Funding

The authors did not receive funding for this research. Richard James has previously received honoraria to cover travel expenses for gambling conferences (4^th International Symposium on Excessive Gambling) from the Swiss Government.

Notes on contributors

Alex Bradley

Alex Bradley is a Teaching Associate at the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham. His research interest is primarily in the use of large data to address real world problems.

Richard J. E. James

Richard J. E. James, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham. His research has primarily looked at the behavioural mechanisms involved in mobile gambling and behavioural addiction, and the latent structure of disordered gambling and other disorders.