Tweet or “re-tweet”? An experiment of message strategy and interactivity on Twitter

Abstract

Purpose – Although a large number of prior studies have discussed the impact of using social media to organizations, the existing literature has not yet provided a clear guidance on what specific communication strategy organizations should adopt on social media and what relationship they need to establish with the public. To fill this theoretical gap, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of message strategy and interactivity from a relationship-building perspective within a social media context. Design/methodology/approach – Through a 2×2 between-subjects experiment (n=84), this study tests the effects of two message strategies, communal-relationship oriented messages and exchange-relationship oriented messages, with either a high or low level of interactivity within a corporate Twitter setting. Findings – The study findings indicate that communication strategies with different relationship orientations differ in quality. Communal-relationship oriented messages tend to generate more favorable relationship outcomes such as trust and control mutuality than exchange-relationship oriented messages. Message interactivity also positively influences attitude toward the company, perceived company credibility, and commitment. Originality/value – The unique contribution of this study is to extend relationship theories to a discussion of what message strategies organizations should use on social media. It suggests that messages oriented toward different relationships can lead to different outcomes. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of message interactivity in building a relationship between an organization and the public.

Helping those who help us: co-branded and co-created Twitter promotion in CSR partnerships

“…Previous research has identified characteristics of tweets that are associated with higher levels of retweeting: for example, textual content (e.g., Araujo et al, 2015;Auger, 2014);hashtags (e.g., boyd et al, 2010;Suh et al, 2010), and interactivity (e.g., Burton and Soboleva, 2011;Li and Li, 2014). There have been mixed results on the effect of mentions on retweeting: Yang and Counts (2010) found that tweets containing mentions were more likely to be retweeted, but other authors have found that mentions decreased the number of retweets (Soboleva et al, 2015;Suh et al, 2010).…”

Security information sharing via Twitter: 'Heartbleed' as a case study

“…While it is entirely possible that the IT group retweeted content could be viewed as evidence that they played a supporting role in the debate (see also work on message strategies by Li and Li, 2014). However, another interpretation focuses on expertise rather than leadership in this debate.…”

“…Such frequencies can help establish which groups appeared to share information more widely. The focus was on which Twitter users responded to, rather than initiated, a tweet (see also research on credibility and favourability of communal versus exchange tweets by Li and Li, 2014). The analysis was conducted with all identifiable user groups, excluding the unclassified group (IT professional, legal, finance, entrepreneur, press, and marketing, n = 44,673).…”

“…The advantage of social media is that it allows rapid dissemination of official advice (e.g., in the form of tweets and retweets (RTs) on Twitter; see also Li and Li, 2014) to various stakeholders (e.g., Pang et al, 2014) via a large network of people who can continue to share the information, thus reaching a broad audience (i.e., a snowball effect). Such awareness campaigns have provided researchers with a wealth of data relating to a wide range of issues such as flu trends, vaccination attitudes and psychological wellbeing (Achrekar et al, 2011;Anger and Kittl, 2011;Byun et al, 2013;De Choudhury, 2014;Kim et al, 2009;Love et al, 2013; see also Vargo et al, 2015).…”

Estrategias de gestión de los clubes de golf de la Comunidad de Madrid en Twitter

“…Diversos estudios han encontrado que la interactividad en los mensajes influye positivamente en la actitud hacia la compañía, generando credibilidad y compromiso de los seguidores (Li & Li, 2014;Men & Tsai, 2015;Laroche et al, 2013;Kim, Sung, & Kang, 2014). En consecuencia, algunos autores proponen diferentes herramientas que pueden favorecer una gestión más estratégica y dialógica que promueva la participación de los usuarios: preguntas, concursos o sorteos (Men & Tsai, 2012;Sisson, 2017), contenidos de estilo de vida (IAB, 2016), funciones multimedia (Kim, Kim, & Sung, 2011;Gao, 2016), o la inclusión de enlaces (Aced & Lalueza, 2016).…”