Investigation of social media usage and sports brand preferences of Kocaeli university students

The aim of this study was to investigate how much time students from the Kocaeli University Faculty of Sport Sciences spend on social media and to determine their sports brand preferences. The data required for the research were collected using the scale method. The scale was applied to 543 students from Kocaeli University, Faculty of Sport Sciences. During the data collection process, online scale was used, which was created in Google Forms.A25-item brand loyalty scale, which Karkar (2018) used to explain the relationship between content marketing and brand loyalty in social media applications, a social media addiction scale by Tutgun-Ünal (2015), and a 17-item scale related to social media usage purposes were used. In the analysis of data, descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, and one way ANOVA were used. A total of 99.5% of the participants in the survey group consisting of 543 people use social media. These result indicates that social media is widely used by young people. In agreement with the obtained results, we observed that students stated that they spent a lot of time on social media; furthermore, the majority of students said that it was difficult to understand how time passed while using social media. However, it has been understood that social media environment is a big marketing area for brands. Thus, there is a significant relationship between the time spent on social media and the sports brand preferences.