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Abstract
Recently, the population and importance of social media has increased rapidly. Consequently, the sport industry utilizes social media as effective marketing and communication tools, so the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) also manages their social media with approximately 47 million followers. However, limited research has examined and identified UFC fans social media motivation. Therefore, there was need to reveal UFC fans social media motivation and understand their consumption. Accordingly, based on the Uses and Gratifications (U&G) theory, this study was to explore and refine UFC fans specific motivational factors through qualitative research. Furthermore, this study was to refine an instrument to measure the social media motivation of MMA fans and validating the refined instrument, and to investigate how social media could affect PPV and ticket purchase intention by using fan identification as a mediator. The results showed that UFC fans have unique factors that distinguished it from other sports fans.