Abstract
With hundreds of millions of active users generating almost a half of a billion tweets each day, Twitter has solidified itself as one of the most popular websites in today’s digital world. Because of this popularity, companies seeking to leverage the large audience have gravitated toward Twitter. This study examines how the Fortune 500 uses Twitter by analyzing 9,122 corporate tweets and 1,509 user replies through the use of content analysis. Examined factors include interactivity (non-interactive vs. reactive vs. interactive), company type (B2B vs. B2C), and user reply valence (positive vs. neutral vs. negative). Company response time to user replies is also investigated. The study results point to interactive tweets generating the most engagement. B2Cs not only respond faster to user replies but also generate more engagement than B2Bs. Negative replies can decrease engagement for B2Bs and B2Cs, but the influence on B2Bs is more profound. Companies responded the fastest to negative replies followed by positive replies and neutral replies, respectively. Thus, a company should assess its own business practices, target audience, and ability to perform customer service before creating a social media account such as Twitter.
Highlights
The results revealed that both main effects of interactivity (Pillai’s trace = .217, F(6, 18,230) = 370.62, p < .001) and company type (Pillai’s trace = .033, F(3, 9,114) = 102.64, p < .001) and interaction effect (Pillai’s trace = .042, F(6, 18,230) = 64.95, p < .001) were statistically significant
Though there are lab experiments demonstrating that negative comments under certain conditions could elicit favorable attitudes, this study revealed that negative user comments by and large have a dampening effect on company engagement in the form of retweets and likes for both B2Bs and B2Cs
To effectively manage credibility in today’s social media world, companies should tweet often and respond to user replies as quickly as possible to create a culture of interactivity
Summary
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are important strategic communication vehicles for companies to build relationships and initiate conversations with the public. The current research contributes to this body of literature by analyzing 9,122 corporate tweets and 1,509 user replies collected from Twitter, a popular social media platform “used by virtually all big Western companies either for marketing or to respond to customers – and sometimes both” (Parmar, 2015). The interaction between company and user needs to be examined as more companies gravitate toward Twitter to meet the ever increasing number of users. The study results will give a sense of how interactive companies are on Twitter along with how the tone of a user’s reply can affect company response time along with future engagement among users
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