Determinants of Voluntary Organizations’ Attention on Facebook: The Case of Norwegian Voluntary Organizations

Abstract

By offering low-cost tools of communication and coordination, social media platforms such as Facebook may constitute a substitute for coordination by means of hierarchical organization. Social media may disrupt, appearing as a “weapon of the weak,” a relationship that has traditionally linked membership to resources and influence. Against such a backdrop, this article investigates the extent to which organizational features and activities as well as the content of Facebook posts predict the reach and audience of voluntary organizations on Facebook. By linking organizational survey data and social media data and harnessing machine learning methods, hypotheses linking organizational features and the reach and level of attention obtained by voluntary organizations on Facebook are tested. The results support the notion that social media may work as a substitute for hierarchical forms of membership mobilization but do not support the “weapon of the weak” hypothesis.