Communication Styles on Twitter

Singapore.
The next speaker at ICA 2010 is Chih-Hui Lai, whose focus is on the Facebook newsfeed, the Twitter feed, and similar feeds as social awareness streams (SAS) - consisting of messages which are public or semi-public, short and consumed in streams, and transmitted through articulated networks that structure communication. Twitter is a typical example for this, and his is what the study focussed on.

Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds are quite similar in style, in fact - both offer a kind of phatic communion, a communicative means of opening communication and maintaining relationships. This is also shown in the inclusion of emoticons and other elements. At the same time, the strength of SAS also lies in their use for quick information sharing - and while most research focusses on the use of such SAS for special events (crises, political developments, etc.), the phatic elements are just as important.

The study examined different communication patterns on Twitter, then, coding messages for different communication categories: information sharing, opinions and complaints, statements and random information, thoughts, updates on the poster's current status, and other. This was done for a random 350 active Twitter users (excluding commercial entities). Status updates were followed in prominence by random thoughts, opinions and complaints, and information sharing; females and posts from mobile devices were especially strong on personal status updates.

This allows for a categorisation of different users: some 20% of users are informers (mainly information sharing), while some 80% are meformers (mainly status updates). Informers have more friends and followers on Twitter, and are also more conversational - they are referenced more often in other users' messages. The more diverse messages people posted, the more likely they were to engage in conversation, too - but they also posted fewer messages overall.

Meformers engage in different types of phatic messages (they switch fluidly between the phatic and non-phatic); informers have more social contacts and are likely to use more mentions of others than meformers. They may have more social influence,and might be more involved in sending and receiving valuable information. If more diversely posting users posted less, this could also be related to the greater effort involved in such diverse engagement.

Technorati : Facebook, ICA 2010, Twitter, communication, meformers, microblogging, phatic communication
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