ABSTRACT

Social media has made a major impact around the world. From assisting in connecting people on a day-to-day basis to being a catalyst in democratic revolutions, social media has changed the perspective and relationship that individuals have with the media and with each other. Social media, including social networking, blogs, video platforms, and micro-blogs, is used to create instant one-way and two-way communication between individuals, communities, and corporations. This type of communication between groups is powerful, and has made online services such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn a part of users’ daily lives. In the spring of 2013, Facebook had more than 1.1 billion users (Facebook, 2013), Twitter was the fastest growing social media site with nearly 21% of the world’s internet population using it every month (Smith, 2013), and YouTube visitors watched 6 billion hours of video every month (Bullas, 2013). Macnamara and Zerfass (2012) examined how social media is being used by organizations in Europe and Australia and the challenges of openness, strategy and management. Consistent with studies of social media in the United States, the types of social media most used by organizations in these countries were social networks (e.g., Facebook), microblogging (e.g., Twitter), and video sharing (e.g., YouTube).