What motivates communicators to share best practices?
January 20, 2016 • Jonathan McVerry
At its core, social media is all about two-way communication. Users share moments, ideas and opinions, and comment on others’ moments, ideas and opinions. Communicators who run accounts for businesses often embrace this back-and-forth in order to learn how to better engage their audiences.
But why? What motivates a social media manager to reach across company lines and share best practices? By surveying nearly 120 social media communicators, Alisa Lertpratchya and Serena Carpenter of Michigan State University found that motivations varied based on gender, experience and professional development efforts.
“Social media communicators work in such a new area that leadership often doesn’t know how to define their role,” Carpenter said. “How do these managers know what they know? [They learn through] self-education and by reaching out to others. There is a social media community that helps them define what their role is.”
The researchers recruited practitioners who handle social media content for companies within the journalism, public relations and advertising industries. Lertpratchya and Carpenter examined how qualities of the communicators predicted reciprocity (giving with the expectation of something in return), reputation and altruistic motivations.
“People want forms of social exchange,” Lertpratchya said. “They can feel lost without it.”
According to survey responses, communicators were most likely to share knowledge for altruistic reasons. However, a number of factors were revealed based on the three areas the researchers examined: What effects do gender, self-education efforts and professional experience have on motivations to share information?
The research was funded by the Arthur W. Page Center and published in a special issue of the PRism journal. The most fascinating result, according to the researchers, was the difference between male and female communicators when it came to reciprocity. There was a significant difference between what motivates males and females to share information.
“Female communicators felt they were less likely to receive feedback, so in turn they were not as likely to give it,” Carpenter said. “There’s a relationship there, and if males are most likely to receive feedback, they are better able to build and be a part of that community.”
Other results revealed relationships among communicators with significant professional experience, as well as communicators with an interest in their own professional development. The researchers say that the more seasoned a social media managers is, the more likely he or she will share best practices with others for reputational reasons.
In a new burgeoning industry like social media, it is vital for practitioners to learn as the industry evolves. Lertpratchya and Carpenter asked respondents to gauge the amount of effort and time they focus on their own professional development. But what kind of effect would their commitment to self-education have on their enthusiasm to share knowledge with others? The surveyed social media communicators who focused more on self-education were more likely to share social media strategies for reputational and altruistic reasons.
The biggest surprise coming out of the project was the role of reciprocity in the sharing disparity between men and women, a phenomenon that Carpenter said has not been seen in previous literature.
Knowing these relationships exist, the researchers want to use the new data to figure out why, and conduct focused interviews with the communicators to get a better understanding of their motivations, needs and strategies when it comes to sharing information.
“This is just the first step. We will figure out the ‘why’ by talking to the people running the social media for companies,” Carpenter said. “Thanks to the Page Center, we were able to carry out this project at a high quality that would not be possible without the support.”
According to its website, PRism is a free-access, online, peer-refereed public relations and communication research journal. It was established in 2002 to meet the need for readily available, quality controlled public relations and communication research materials online.
(Illustration: iStockPhoto)