How employees use Twitter to talk about work: A typology of work-related tweets

Abstract

In organizational research employees' use of personal social media for work remains an understudied phenomenon. Yet, it is important to gain understanding of these online behaviors as they might have consequences on the individual and organizational level. We provide a typology for work-related Twitter use based on a large-scale content analysis (N ¼ 38,124) of tweets sent by 433 employees across different organizations. We found that work-related topics were prevalent in 36.5% of all tweets. Employees' workrelated tweets paint a picture that is consistent with the archetypical social media behaviors e i.e., knowledge sharing and socialization e identified in earlier research. Employees share profession-, organization-and work-related tweets strategically with professional contacts, enhancing horizontal communication among organization members. Furthermore, Twitter enhances the integration of personal and professional life domains, as employees often tweet about their work outside regular work hours but also tweet on a personal title while at work.

Paradoxical implications of personal social media use for work

“…This measure represents the use of personally owned social media accounts for work‐related communication. The scale is derived from van Zoonen et al ., and was anchored 1 (never) to 7 (very frequently; multiple times a day). Work‐related social media use was measured by asking five questions about the use of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn respectively.…”

“…Social media are web‐based services that allow individuals to ‘(1) construct a public or semi‐public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system’ (Boyd and Ellison, , p. 211), such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Although management does not usually prescribe (or, for that matter, proscribe) the use of these personal social media, employees increasingly choose to utilise them for work (McDonald and Thompson, ; van Zoonen et al ., ).…”

“…This study explores these tensions in the particular context of personal (not enterprise) social media use for work within organisations. Such use is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in organisations (Leonardi et al ., ; Moqbel et al ., ) with studies reporting from 66 per cent to as much as 80 per cent of employees using their personal social media for work (Leftheriotis and Giannakos, ; van Zoonen et al ., ). Yet there is little research in this area.…”

Voicing job satisfaction and dissatisfaction through Twitter: employees’ use of cyberspace

“…This is perhaps surprising as some research on blogging has suggested that this mechanism provides employees with the opportunity to vent about the negative aspects of their jobs, to seek justice, or to distance themselves from corporate culture (Richards, ; Klaas et al ., ; Richards and Kosmala, ). At the same time, this finding is in line with research which shows that social media users are more likely to share content with a positive or neutral rather than negative sentiment (van Zoonen et al ., ) and that negative online utterances tend to be deemed inappropriate and incongruent with self‐views, particularly if the content is related to their professional life (Marwick and Boyd, ). The higher percentage of positive tweets among highly influential users also supports this view.…”

“…At present there is limited research exploring how Twitter may be used to voice job satisfaction/dissatisfaction. An analysis of 38,124 tweets of 433 employees in professional jobs (van Zoonen et al ., ) found that approximately a third of these were work‐related and that these referred most frequently to the profession, the organization, work behaviours and in‐group communication. The research by van Zoonen et al .…”