Benefits of professional social media use
Final Report Abstract
The aim of this project was to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of using social media for professional purposes by integrating interpersonal (adding contacts) and intrapersonal processes (processing information). We argued that networking links these two processes because, on the one hand, it influences the size and composition of a person’s online network and thus shapes the content of the social media news feed. On the other hand, we assumed that better networkers also use social media more often and/or more efficiently and thus develop more ambient awareness, knowledge about who knows what in the network. The second aim was to explore the different temporal dynamics of the processes and to explain how the use of social media increases informational benefits and creativity. For this purpose, a measurement burst field study combining two experience sampling periods (bursts) with a one-year longitudinal study was conducted. The third aim was to further investigate the accuracy and automatic vs. controlled nature of ambient awareness. To this end, a paradigm established in social psychology for investigating automatic inferences was adapted to the context of expertise inferences from social media posts. Both the experiments and the measurement burst study showed that networking correlates positively with social media use and all dependent variables (ambient awareness, information benefits, creativity, serendipity), but does not play a moderating role. Better networkers therefore do not process information differently. The measurement burst study primarily showed short-term effects of reading and posting on social media platforms. People who read or posted more than normal reported higher information benefits, serendipity and creativity for the same half-day. People who read more than normal also reported higher informational benefits, serendipity, and ambient awareness over a three-month period. Posting, on the other hand, was related to higher creativity within three months. However, there were no effects of social media activity on outcomes in the next survey period. People who were more active on social media than others in general reported more benefits. The results of the four experimental studies clearly showed that ambient awareness is an automatic process that occurs even when the activated target should not lead to false recognition of the implied expertise or when the task is performed under cognitive load. On the one hand, the results are valuable for understanding the cognitive processing involved in social media use. However, they also have high practical relevance, as they show that skimming social media posts in particular is associated with more knowledge and creativity.
Publications
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Ambient Awareness of Who Knows What: Spontaneous Inferences of Domain Expertise. Media Psychology, 27(3), 329-351.
Anderl, Christine; Levordashka, Ana & Utz, Sonja
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Feeling guilty about browsing social media at work? SPSP, Character & Context Blog.
Anderl, C.
