Trade Unions on YouTube

Abstract

use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Digital audiences of union organising: A social media analysis

“…Digital audiences appear to be more complicated than traditional audiences and, despite members being the main audience that unions actively refer to, there is a wide variety of other audiences following union accounts, engaging with them or being mentioned in unions’ tweets. Twitter interactions are not as straightforward as members following their respective unions to learn about their activities and participate (Hodder and Houghton, 2015; Panagiotopoulos and Barnett, 2015; Geelan and Hodder, 2017; Jansson and Uba, 2019). Most union accounts are being followed by influential stakeholders with significant amplification potential (e.g.…”

“…An even larger variety of followers was observed in the Twitter account of the transnational organisation Union Solidarity International (Geelan and Hodder, 2017). Outside Twitter’s open information network, unions have attempted to reach out to members or potential members in channels for more targeted engagement like YouTube (Jansson and Uba, 2019).…”