Olympian athletes are turning over their own social media accounts to sponsors, agreeing to quotas of postings on Twitter and Facebook. Such deals between the two parties will allow sharing of photos and insights of the athletes and let other people send commercial messages in their name.
Agents of ace US skaters Ashley Wagner and Gracie Gold both remarked that the respective sponsors draft some of their tweets plugging their brand. Gold’s agent Yuki Saegusa said in an interview that it is the first Olympics where actually a social media calendar will be needed to be maintain convenience and the athletes have to mention something on a given day. Sponsors make sure schedules of tweets are adhered to.
In the words of Wagner’s IMG agent David Baden, this sort of deals between the athletes and the sponsors are like a contract to which they abide by and it also reveals how important and popular social media has become nowadays for advertisement. He said that for this they would access Wagner’s account and post commercial tweets which will be viewed by more than 60,000followers which she possess all-round the globe.
