To Share or Not to Share: Examining Social Media in Public Relations Scholarship

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social media has become an indispensable component of everyday life and had a transformative impact on strategic communication. This study reflects on the influence of social media in scholarship and examines social media research to identify strengths, gaps, and assumptions in this body of literature. Using structural topic modeling and network analysis, this research models every word published in six leading journals studying public relations from 2012 to 2022 in two separate studies. First, a census of the 2,675 articles, totaling 15926,460 words, is analyzed to establish the percentage of scholarship related to social media, methodologies used to study social media, and how social media interacts with other topics within public relations. Second, a subset of 666 articles that heavily emphasize social media are examined in order to identify the key social media topics within public relations scholarship. This research finds that social media is a major connecting topic within public relations scholarship; however, few social-media specific topics are being studied in public relations scholarship. Even research focused on social media is more heavily emphasizing existing public relations theory than social media-specific topics. We conclude with three propositions that detail a path forward for scholarship regarding social media.