A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book
Organizational communication on Twitter: Differences between non-profit and for-profit organizations in the context of climate change
Authors: Kim Holmberg, Iina Hellsten
Editors: Christopher M Schmidt
Publication year: 2016
Book title : Crossmedia-Kommunikation in kulturbedingten Handlungsräumen
Series title: Europäische Kulturen in der Wirtschaftskommunikation
First page : 305
Last page: 313
ISBN: 978-3-658-11075-8
eISBN: 978-3-658-11076-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-11076-5_16
Web address : http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-658-11076-5_16
Twitter as a socio-technical platform provides organizations with new ways to reach their stakeholders. In this paper, we compare the use of Twitter specific affordances – such as hashtags, mentions of usernames and sharing of URLs along the tweets in a sample of 1520 tweets sent by 16 profit organizations, and 1042 tweets sent by 18 non-profit organizations in the context of climate change debate. We also compare the use of Twitter for information sharing, engaging in the community and calls-for-action (Lovejoy & Saxton 2012) between the organizations. Our results show that non-profit organizations used Twitter more for engaging in community than profit organizations whose tweets were almost completely (96%) about information sharing. Non-profit organizations shared more hashtags than profit-organizations, in particular hashtags related to campaigns and events. We can conclude that the two types of organizations used Twitter specific affordances differently to reach their targeted audiences.
Downloadable publication This is an electronic reprint of the original article. |