Right on track? : Corporate twitter use under pressure

• Since its launch in 2006, Twitter use has evolved and is increasingly being adopted in a variety of contexts. One such area of use is business, where companies have tried to establish practices and guidelines for company and employee ”tweeting”. This paper presents a study on Twitter use by SJ, the national Swedish train operator. The aim of the study is to investigate how SJ (known on Twitter under the handle @SJ_AB) made use of the platform at hand to communicate with customers during the tumultuous Christmas season of 2010. Specifically, the paper features analysis of an extensive data set containing approximatley 2000 tweets tagged as relevant to the study and archived during the winter of 2010/11 using the TwapperKeeper application. By reporting findings on Twitter use during the height of what is perhaps the busiest holiday season, which also featured severe weather conditions, the paper provides unique insights into the practice of Twitter use in a corporate context. Moreover, by utilizing social network analyses of a large dataset archived utilizing state-of-the-art online applications, the study contributes to the development of scientific methods to handle large-scale online empirics.

Nyckelord

twitter use

company tweeting

employee tweeting

sj

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