My Views Do Not Reflect Those of My Employer: Differences in Behavior of Organizations' Official and Personal Social Media Accounts

TL;DR

This study reveals substantial differences in Twitter behavior and retweet-network structure across organizational levels (organization main/side and individual main/side) within a Finnish climate policy network. By constructing account-level and collapsed graphs and applying backboning and bootstrapping, the authors show that relying on a single organizational level can misrepresent an organization's online presence. Applying SBM and ERGM demonstrates that level- and type-specific patterns influence detected communities and tie-formation tendencies, with higher within-sector homophily and lower triadic closure among main accounts. The findings emphasize the need to consider multi-level organizational boundaries in social media research to avoid biased conclusions and to better capture the full spectrum of organizational influence online.

Abstract

On social media, the boundaries between people's private and public lives often blur. The need to navigate both roles, which are governed by distinct norms, impacts how individuals conduct themselves online, and presents methodological challenges for researchers. We conduct a systematic exploration on how an organization's official Twitter accounts and its members' personal accounts differ. Using a climate change Twitter data set as our case, we find substantial differences in activity and connectivity across the organizational levels we examined. The levels differed considerably in their overall retweet network structures, and accounts within each level were more likely to have similar connections than accounts at different levels. We illustrate the implications of these differences for applied research by showing that the levels closer to the core of the organization display more sectoral homophily but less triadic closure, and how each level consists of very different group structures. Our results show that the common practice of solely analyzing accounts from a single organizational level, grouping together all levels, or excluding certain levels can lead to a skewed understanding of how organizations are represented on social media.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Collapsed Graph with All Levels
• Figure 2: Activity Level by Hour of Week
• Figure 2: Burstiness Comparison: Tukey's HSD
• Figure 3: Burstiness Density
• Figure 4: Mixing Matrices for Organization Levels. Cells represent probability of observing an edge for the given sender type (row) and receiver type (column).