Which Audiences Engage With Advocacy Groups on Twitter? Explaining the Online Engagement of Elite, Peer, and Mass Audiences With Advocacy Groups

Abstract

Gaining an audience on social media is an important goal of contemporary policy advocacy. While previous studies demonstrate that advocacy-dedicated nonprofit organizations—what we refer to as advocacy groups—use different social media tools, we still know little about what specific audiences advocacy groups set out to target on social media, and whether those audiences actually engage with these groups. This study fills this gap, deploying survey and digital trace data from Twitter over a 12-month period for the Australian case. We show that while groups target a variety of audiences online, there are differences between group types in their strategic objectives and the extent to which particular audiences engage with them. Business groups appear to target elite audiences more often compared with citizen and professional groups, whereas citizen groups receive more online engagement from mass and peer audiences.