The Power of Self-Promotion: Twitter Followers and Guaranteed Purses in Professional Boxing

Abstract

The social media phenomenon has provided tremendous opportunities for self-promotion. Many professional boxers have engaged with social media through a number of outlets. This study will focus on professional boxers' use of one of these outlets, Twitter, and its correlation with their guaranteed purses for fights. As only the third study to date utilizing multivariate regression in modeling the determinants of realworld purse data for professional boxers, this study contributes to an underdeveloped segment of the continually-expanding sports economics field, as we analyze the link between social media popularity and sport-specific pay. The analysis highlights the importance of "star power" for professional athletes and provides statistical evidence of how they can benefit financially via enhancing this quality through Twitter (Z21, Z22, M31).