Abstract
Twitter is widely used by companies to reach various stakeholders, but how they use this social media platform is still unclear. To investigate how companies use Twitter, this study analyzes the content of the Twitter accounts of four large information technology companies, focusing on the arrangement of different Twitter accounts and on message characteristics (content, message elements, and communication strategies). The results show that companies used architectures of different Twitter accounts to serve various stakeholder groups. The companies’ tweets covered diverse topics within the corporate, marketing, and technical communication domains. The tweets focused more on providing information and promoting action than on facilitating dialogue.
Highlights
Twitter is widely used by companies to reach various stakeholders, but how they use this social media platform is still unclear
We formulated two research questions: (a) How do large information technology (IT) companies arrange their accounts on Twitter? and (b) How do large IT companies use Twitter? In answering the second question, we focus on three aspects of tweets: content, message elements, and communication strategies
All four companies used multiple accounts to shape their presence on Twitter
Summary
Twitter is widely used by companies to reach various stakeholders, but how they use this social media platform is still unclear. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is an open community in which users can reach content provided by strangers These characteristics make Twitter suitable for companies to disseminate information, build relationships, interact with stakeholders, and monitor public opinions. We focused this study on large IT companies, which are forerunners in social media use, having higher adoption rates of SNSs than do other industries (Culnan et al, 2010; Veldeman et al, 2017). Investigating the adoption of SNSs from a technology acceptance perspective, Veldeman et al (2017) found that large IT companies have higher expectations of SNSs’ usefulness than do other types of companies—perhaps because of their familiarity with computer-mediated communication and because their stakeholders are more active on social media. Among IT companies, we expected that large companies would show more sophisticated and elaborate usage of Twitter than would smaller companies. Xiong et al (2018) found that company size affects the way companies adopt Twitter in their communication: Smaller companies with limited resources tend to use the platform less for marketing purposes and more for one-way communication. Xiong et al (2019) came to similar conclusions
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