A comparative study of local broadcasters' Twitter utilization in different market conditions

Abstract

Although the importance of over-the-air broadcasting has gradually dwindled in the entire media market, no one cannot deny local broadcasters' significant contribution to serving informational needs in local communities (FCC, 1999). Regarding local television's Twitter use for promotion and branding, Greer and Ferguson (2011) examined Twitter sites of 488 local television stations in the U.S. to identify the relationship between stations' status and content of stations' Twitter sites. They found that most local television stations offer news stories but barely direct viewers to their actual on-air programming. In their other study (Ferguson and Greer, 2011), they analyzed 111 local radio stations' Twitter sites to understand how regional radio stations use their business. The previous studies successfully demonstrate how local broadcasters use Twitter, but they do not capture any differences among broadcasters with different conditions. This study empirically analyzes how local broadcasters from different conditions utilize Twitter to adapt to the digitalized interactive media environment. Local broadcasters' social media performance can differ because American local broadcast markets differ in market size (Designated Market Area) and funding system (commercial vs. public), and station ownership. Thus, the scope of this study is limited to two extreme cases for comparison's sake. For comparative analysis, this study will analyze two different local different broadcasters groups – one group from Nielsen's top 20 DMA and another group from the bottom 20 DMA. Local broadcasters' Tweets from two other groups are analyzed to address the differences in Twitter uses 1) between public and commercial stations, and 2) between high-resourced (top DMA) and low-resourced (bottom DMA) market. This study will implement two methods to investigate the local broadcasters' local service activities in social network platforms, Twitter. First, website research collects qualitative and quantitative information directly from the studied websites. The website research will delineate the local broadcasters' current social media adoption. Second, network analysis of Twitter networks conducts to describe the complex conversational interaction within the Twitter network. Network analysis (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005) is one way to visualize and analyze how social media networks are connected, how they interact, and which agent is most influential in networks. The open-source program NodeXL will be used for network analysis and visualization of study results among the social network analysis tools. As a result, this study will address whether local broadcasters, which is often considered a thing of the past, still can justify their existence in the age of fiber-optic broadband and app-based mobile-centered media environment.