Organizational Adoption Of Social Media In The Usa: A Mixed Method Approach

Current literature about organizational adoption of social media mainly focuses on how organizations are using these technologies to interact with customers and other stakeholders. In this paper, we expand this line of research by exploring the internal processes that organizations put in place to support their social media initiatives. Using a mixed methods approach that combines data mining and content analysis techniques, we examine the adoption of social media across multiple industries. To avoid limiting our sample to a specific social media technology, we analysed 20,285 web-based job postings related to social media job, and identified around 9000 companies from those job postings representing all 20 main industries in the USA. Results provide a broader view of social media diffusion across industries, highlight new organizational uses of social media (e.g., social media listening, using social media to engage with industry and media influencers) and provide deeper insight into the internal processes employed by organizations to support their social media initiatives (e.g., develop social media strategies, managing social media platform, developing social media metrics).