IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jda/journl/vol.49year2015issue5pp421-428.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The business use of Twitter by Australian listed companies

Author

Listed:
  • Feng Xiong
  • Kim MacKenzie

    (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Abstract

The rapid rise of the business use of social media platform Twitter by organisations around the world, highlights the need for understanding the degree to which the new communication tool has been adopted, and how it is being used for business purposes. US researchers Case and King (2011) and Heaps (2009) provided important early insight into the business use of Twitter, however, their research was limited to a small sample of listed companies from limited industry sectors in the US. Our study builds on these prior research by extending the research to an Australian context and explores the business use of Twitter by the top 100 Australian ASX (Australian Securities Exchange) listed corporations in 2013. The study used general online search methods to identify that 60 Australian companies (60%) from a variety of industry sectors had adopted the business use of Twitter. A thematic template approach was developed based on the combination of prior research and results from a test pilot analysis. The final template consisted of 11 different business communication purposes. This framework was used to examine the content of the business ‘tweets’ from the 60 companies in order to identify the degree to which Twitter was being used for different business communication purposes, and if industry sectors differed in their business use. The study found that companies had adopted the use of Twitter for a variety of business purposes which differed at the industry level. ‘Corporate Promotion’, ‘Market News’ and ‘Customer Service Enquiries’ were the most popular business purposes for using Twitter. While Consumer Discretionary companies emphasised the use of Twitter for ‘Customer Service Enquiries’, companies from Industrials, Energy and Materials industries were more likely to disclose ‘Financial Reporting’ and ‘Potential Financial Information’. The findings in this paper endorse the validity of the use of Twitter for business communication purposes for all types of organisations, by providing evidence of the number of ASX firms who had adopted the platform, the different industries they represent, and the broad range of business communication purposes being explored. The findings provide normative guidelines for corporations yet to adopt Twitter, or for those seeking to understand how early adopter firms have leveraged a social media technology, in order to reach and communicate with 21st Century audiences.

Suggested Citation

  • Feng Xiong & Kim MacKenzie, 2015. "The business use of Twitter by Australian listed companies," Journal of Developing Areas, Tennessee State University, College of Business, vol. 49(5), pages 421-428, Special I.
  • Handle: RePEc:jda:journl:vol.49:year:2015:issue5:pp:421-428
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_developing_areas/v049/49.6.xiong.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ana Fern'andez Vilas & Rebeca P. D'iaz Redondo & Keeley Crockett & Majdi Owda & Lewis Evans, 2023. "Twitter Permeability to financial events: an experiment towards a model for sensing irregularities," Papers 2312.11530, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Business Innovation; Technology Adoption; Twitter; Social Media; Corporate Communication; ASX Listed Firms;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
    • M15 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - IT Management

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jda:journl:vol.49:year:2015:issue5:pp:421-428. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Abu N.M. Wahid (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cbtnsus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.