What kinds of content should your business tweet if you want to build stakeholder engagement?
We know what the popular business press and social media advocates recommend, but sometimes we wonder (rightly) whether this research is adequately “scientific”.
I know that I look at recommendations for “How to Tweet”, and while these recommendations make sense, they also support what we want to be true. For example, I want it to be true that companies who tweet warm, open, and positive content will make stronger stakeholder relationships that companies that go on and on about how great their are and only talk about themselves.
I was excited to receive a working paper by “Entrepreneurial Narratives Online: Influencing stakeholder engagement through Twitter”, that concurs with conventional “wisdom” and also adds texture and insight. Although the study is positioned as a test of theories about narratives that build startup legitimacy and credibility, the research has some useful implications for any business.
In their study, which they presented at the Academy of Management in August, Authors looked at 12 entrepreneurial (start-up/early stage) firms, their twitter streams, and the engagement of their b2b twitter followers.
Analyzing the content of the stream of “tweets by” the company, Researchers identified three categories of information shared:
- Persona Tweets: conveying tastes, interest, and values, and offering insight into company culture
- Quality Tweets: conveying reputation, expertise, product quality and achievements, and
- Relational Orientation Tweets: conveying a warm or cool, inviting or passive orientation towards stakeholders themselves, including tweets about stakeholder recognition and invitations to events.
Analyzing how these categories were represented in each company’s tweets, they broke down four tweeting strategies:
- Dabbling (overall low activity)
- Quality Affirmation (all about how good they were),
- Relational Personification (more persona and relational content, low quality content, moderately positive emotion)
- Balanced & Positive (persona, quality and relational tweets, with higher % positive emotion)
They also analyzed “tweets about” the companies by their followers. These tweets broke into three clusters:
- Disseminating info: (e.g., BizCo has a new product…)
- Overt praise (e.g., I love @BizCo’s new interface)
- Sharing thoughts with company (e.g., Thanks for the great service, @BizCo), including replies to the company queries as well as spontaneous feedback
Which strategies would you think were connected to the highest stakeholder engagement?
Balanced & Positive had the highest engagement overall, followed immediately by Relational personification.
In contrast, Dabblers and Quality affirmers say no stakeholder prosing or sharing of thoughts. Their stakeholders’ tweets simply passed on the facts about the company or products.
The quick takeaway supports what most practitioners believe– that a twitter stream that humanizes a company and demonstrates an actual interest in relating with stakeholders will be related to higher stakeholder engagement. Dabbling and talking all about yourself will be related to low, data-only stakeholder engagement.
The second takeaway is that a twitter strategy that fits the ‘culture of communication’ in the medium itself will likely perform better in that culture than a strategy that seems tone deaf to the culture of the medium. The one-sided, info only narrative might be perfectly appropriate for another medium (e.g., annual reports) and thus get appropriate type of attention from stakeholders (e.g., careful data analysis).
A bigger-picture takeaway is that organizations can actually use Twitter to construct a story about themselves, even when this story is constructed of ‘narrative fragments. Small bites of content, shared in a non-linear format (e.g., without a beginning or an end, or without the kind of narrative arc you’d create with Storify), still construct a ‘story’ about who the organization is.
Of course, there are many caveats for an exploratory study with such a small sample — it’s impossible to tell whether & how balanced & Positive differ from Relational in engendering engagement. There was simply not enough cases to offer a clear contrast. And, there are some other methodological limitations too detailed to discuss here.
Ultimately, this research supports what we know to be true about twitter– We can use twitter to draw resources towards us. The kinds of resources we attract to our companies via twitter will depend on how we share information about our organization’s personality and reputation, as well as how we communicate what kind of relationship we want with stakeholders.
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