Which social media do we use in our work and why?

A while ago, I blogged here about my research into social media use and knowledge sharing. I will now come back to you with a series of blogs discussing the results of this research. In this blog, I will discuss which social media proved to be most popular and what we like about them.

Which social media do we use?
On average we use 2 social media tools in our work, with individual cases ranging from 0 to 12 tools. Which social media we use can be seen in table 1 below, showing the number and percentage of respondents using a certain tool. LinkedIn is by far the most used social media tool for work purposes; 69% of respondents indicated to use this tool. Other popular tools are Twitter, Facebook and Yammer. Users of Twitter gather the most connections.

Table 1: Used social media tools

What do we like about our social media?
Different social media have different functionalities and are used for different purposes. What do we like about the different social media tools we use? The different functionalities of social media can be divided into three broad categories:

• Functionalities to build a network. This category includes functionalities necessary to develop and build a network. The tools are directed at establishing oneself as actor in a network, and relating to other actors in the network through the development of ties. Creating a personal profile, connecting to other users, and receiving and providing recommendations (a recommendation also being a tie) are important functionalities in this category.
• Functionalities to interact in a network. This category includes functionalities that facilitate synchronous and asynchronous interaction and communication between actors in the network. All kinds of communication tools, and message and bulletin boards belong to this category, facilitating interaction.
• Functionalities to publish in a network. This category of functionalities is used to publish content in a network. Both closed and open publications can be facilitated, in the sense that others actors in the network may or may not be able to view, comment or edit the publication. Posting content and wiki’s can be assigned to this category. All sorts of content can be posted, including photos, videos, documents, blogs, and music.

So what do we like about our social media? In general, see table 2, functionalities to build a network our deemed most important. Being able to connect to others in the network scores remarkably higher than all other functions. Profiles and communication tools are also highly appreciated functionalities.

Table 2: Functionalitiy scores (measured on a scale from 1 to 7)

What is actually more interesting, is to see how the four most popular tools, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Yammer, score on these functionalities. What do we like about them? Twitter scores significantly higher on functionalities to build a network than LinkedIn. An explanation for this finding can be that LinkedIn is mostly used to connect to particular persons, while this is not the case with Twitter. Twitter is mostly used to send a message to all followers, making the amount of connections more important. The more connections one has, the more people can be reached. A LinkedIn network is possibly more about the quality of connections, while a Twitter network is more about the quantity of connections.

On tools to interact in a network, LinkedIn scores significantly lower than all other services. This shows that interaction is not that important on LinkedIn as it is for other social media. It seems that it is more important to build a network on LinkedIn than to interact with connections. An explanation for this finding can be that LinkedIn is developed around profiles, where Twitter for example is developed around sending messages.

Table 3: Functionality scores per social media tool (measured on a scale from 1 to 7)

Both Twitter and Yammer score significantly higher than LinkedIn on functionalities to publish in a network, showing that people are more likely to share content on Twitter and Yammer than on LinkedIn. Messages on Twitter often include links to content that is stored elsewhere. The result that Yammer is valued more for its functionalities to publish in a network than other social media may be explained by the fact that Yammer is intra-organizational tool. This may cause users to be more comfortable with publishing work-related documents and information in the network, because other users are part of the same organization. Users of social media are often afraid to expose company information. This fear may be less for intra-organizational social media.

Tagged: Research, Social Media, social media in organizations