The effect of sport fans' social identities and identification with the teams on their motivation to use social media and their behaviours on social media

Sports clubs started to use social media more actively due to the increase in the number of members on social media platforms and the effects of social media on people. It's important for the sport club's success to recognize and be in interaction with the sports fans and their communities as well as their sporting achievements. The main purpose of this study is to reveal the impact of the social identities of football fans in Turkey and their identification with the team they support on their motives of social media usage and their social media behaviours. For this purpose, fan groups were reached via Facebook and Twitter platforms and other participants were reached over by convenience sampling method. In this research where survey method of quantitative research is used, the data is collected via online surveys and the effects of sports fans' social identities and their identification on their motivation to use social media and their social media behaviors are investigated. As a result, it was determined that social identity was effective in media consumption, motivation of social media usage and social media behaviors of fans and identification, like social identity, affected the media consumption, motivation of social media usage and social media behaviors of the fans (excluding content consumption on Facebook). In addition to this, in the difference tests, it was found that there were significant differences in the motivations and behaviors in terms of demographic factors. Keywords: Sports Fanship, Social Media, Social Identity, Identification