How the Larger Corporations Engage with Stakeholders through Twitter

The digital era has revolutionised the traditional communication assumptions that we learned during past decades. Social media constitute the new communication challenge. Twitter has recently passed 517 million users. This study examines how some of the largest companies are making use of this popular microblogging site to engage with their stakeholders. Using content analysis, we coded 5,352 tweets. We analysed the tweet frequency, the followers and followings, friending behaviour, the retweets and public messages, and the use that companies are making of different communication tools provided by Twitter to augment the information shared on their tweets. The study found that corporations are not effectively employing the full interactivity potential this site offers to build mutually beneficial relationships with stakeholders. These findings call attention to some key interactivity features that organisations are failing to utilise.