Exploring the synergy between nano-influencers and sports community: behavior mapping through machine learning Jitendra Yadav and Madhvendra Misra Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, Allahabad, India Nripendra P. Rana Department of Management and Marketing, College of Business and Economics, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar, and Kuldeep Singh Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Guntur, India Abstract Purpose – The paper aims to explore the influence of cybersecurity on the semantic orientation of the sports consumers. Focusing on both sport and esports, this study finds the social media factors contributing in the sentiment formation and commenting behavior on Twitter and proposes a scheme for attitude modulation through identification of highly engaged nano-influencers. Design/methodology/approach – Experimental design was used as the research methodology. Data mining from Twitter using RStudio software was conducted using the keyword “cybersecurity” during the time of pandemic. Final corpus of 31,891 tweets were considered for the study. Initial sentiment analysis has been conducted to explore the consumer’s emotional inclination towards cybersecurity. Further through generalized equation modeling the impact of social media attributes over the consumer’s posting behavior has been analyzed. Findings – The research findings reveal that users are inherently positive towards cybersecurity adoption in sports and the factors such as number of tweets, number of positive words contained in these tweets and the authenticity of the information source boost the pre-established tweeting behavior. However, the influx of information from non-organizational sources such as trending topics and discussions have negative impact over the users. Originality/value – This study is first to explore the role of nano-influencers as communication moderators over digital social platforms. This study offers a new understanding of key contributing attributes of sentiments formation over social media and offers a scheme of selection of nano-influencers to modulate the pre-established sentiments of the users. Finally, the current study offers valuable insights into social media engagements and selection of nano-influencers for practicing marketing managers. Keywords Cybersecurity, Machine learning models, Nano-influencers, Pandemic, Sentiment analysis, Social media presence, Sports Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction With the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global health epidemic, sports establishments across the globe have been compelled to shut their doors to fans, restricting the way a sports organization may connect and create a feeling of community with its customers. The 2020 Olympics were scheduled to take place in Tokyo at the end of July but were postponed for the first time in history from March 2020 to July–August 2021. The International Olympic Nano- influencers and sports community The first author is thankful to Ministry of Education, Government of India for providing the financial assistance. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/0959-3845.htm Received 20 March 2021 Revised 10 May 2021 16 July 2021 14 August 2021 Accepted 16 August 2021 Information Technology & People © Emerald Publishing Limited 0959-3845 DOI 10.1108/ITP-03-2021-0219