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The purpose of this research is to investigate the use of Twitter in business as a medium for knowledge sharing and to crowdsource information to support innovation and enhance business relationships in the context of business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

This study uses a combination of methodologies for gathering data in 52 face-to-face interviews across five countries and the downloaded posts from each of the interviewees' Twitter accounts. The tweets were analysed using structural topic modelling (STM), and then compared to the interview data. This method enabled triangulation between stated use of Twitter and respondent's actual tweets.

The research confirmed that individuals used Twitter as a source of information, ideas, promotion and innovation within their industry. Twitter facilitates building relevant business relationships through the exchange of new, expert and high-quality information within like-minded communities in real time, between companies and with their suppliers, customers and also their peers.

As this study covered five countries, further comparative research on the use of Twitter in the B2B context is called for. Further investigation of the formalisation of social media strategies and return on investment for social media marketing efforts is also warranted.

This research highlights the business relationship building capacity of Twitter as it enables customer and peer conversations that eventually support the development of product and service innovations. Twitter has the capacity for marketers to inform and engage customers and peers in their networks on wider topics thereby building the brand of the individual users and their companies simultaneously.

This study focuses on interactions at the individual level illustrating that Twitter is used for both customer and peer interactions that can lead to the sourcing of ideas, knowledge and ultimately innovation. The study is novel in its methodological approach of combining structured interviews and text mining that found the topics of the interviewees' tweets aligned with their interview responses.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the health ministries of Turkey and Slovenia use Twitter as government agencies obliged to communicate with the public.

This study employed a content analysis methodology to examine how Turkish (TR) and Slovenian (SLO) health ministries use Twitter for informing and encouraging behavior change in the public. A total of 662 “tweets” were analyzed. Drawing on prior studies, a coding scheme was developed and employed, and χ² and t-tests were conducted for data analysis. Additionally, this study aimed at effecting a content analysis according to the “four models” method of Grunig and Hunt regarding efforts made to build communication with the public.

This study uncovered that the TR and SLO health ministries did not utilize two-way communication principles for Twitter communication, and their frequency of Twitter use is inadequate.

The sampled tweets were selected by using a scientific sampling method. However, this might not have been substantial enough to represent the entirety of tweets in the study timeframe. Analyzing tweets across a longer timeframe would be helpful in confirming this study's findings. This study was also limited to two countries and to publicly available tweets; the messages of health ministries' followers to the ministries themselves were not examined. The findings of this study may not be generalizable to other countries. Other potential studies, with a particular focus on this topic, may be able to measure individual perceptions of the credibility and usefulness of messages from health ministries and their willingness to engage in two-way communication.

This study is one of the first to evaluate how the health ministries of Turkey and Slovenia communicate on Twitter and to apply the four models of Grunig and Hunt with regard to Twitter. This study also identified that noncompeting government agencies were not minded to communicate with their publics.

This chapter analyses the Norwegian Twitter-sphere during and in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011. Based on a collection of 2.2 million tweets representing the Twitter-sphere during the period 20 July–28 August 2011, the chapter seeks answers to how the micro-blogging services aided in creating situation awareness (SA) related to the emergency event, what role hashtags played in that process and who the dominant crisis communicators were. The chapter is framed by theories and previous research on SA and social media use in the context of emergency events. The findings reveal that Twitter was important in establishing SA both during and in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, that hashtags were of limited value in this process during the critical phase, and that unexpected actors became key communicators.

Twitter is the most widely used platform with an open network; hence, tourists often resort to Twitter to share their travel experiences, satisfaction/dissatisfaction and other opinions. This study is divided into two sections, first to provide a framework for understanding public sentiments through Twitter for tourism insights, second to provide real-time insights of three Indian heritage sites i.e., the Taj Mahal, Red Fort and Golden Temple by extracting 5,000 tweets each (n = 15,000) using Twitter API. Results are interpreted using NRC emotion lexicon and data visualisation using R.

This study attempts to understand the public sentiment on three globally acclaimed Indian heritage sites, i.e. the Taj Mahal, Red Fort and Golden temple using a step-by-step approach, hence proposing a framework using Twitter analytics. Extensive use of various packages of R programming from the libraries has been done for various purposes such as extraction, processing and analysing the data from Twitter. A total of 15,000 tweets from January 2015 to January 2021 were collected of the three sites using different key words. An exploratory design and data visualisation technique has been used to interpret results.

After data processing, 12,409 sentiments are extracted. Amongst the three tourists' spots, the greatest number of positive sentiments is for the Taj Mahal and Golden temple with approximately 25% each. While the most negative sentiment can be seen for the Red Fort (17%). Amongst the positive emotions, the maximum joy sentiment (12%) can be seen in the Golden Temple and trust (21%) in the Red Fort. In terms of negative emotions, fear (13%) can be seen in the Red fort. Overall, India's heritage sites have a positive sentiment (20%), which surpasses the negative sentiment (13%). And can be said that the overall polarity is towards positive.

This study provides a framework on how to use Twitter for tourism insights through text mining public sentiments and provides real- time insights from famous Indian heritage sites.

This chapter analyses the Norwegian authorities’ presence on Twitter during the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks. Twitter activity by two official institutions is analysed in particular, namely, the blood bank at Oslo University Hospital and the Norwegian Police Security Services (PST). Our findings show that the Norwegian authorities were almost completely absent on Twitter during the critical hours of the terrorist attack, and that there was no coordination and synchronisation of communication from the authorities. This official silence allowed the diffusion of speculation and misinformation to take place; these were neither corrected nor addressed, as the analysed PST case shows. In contrast, the blood bank used Twitter to mobilise blood donors to address an acute problem: a shortage of blood to treat casualties. The chapter concludes by offering recommendations to the authorities for future major incidents.

The chapter addresses the question of how crisis and emergency communicators in the justice (police) and health sector in Norway reflect on their use – or lack of use – of social media during the terror crisis on 22 July 2011. We examine how these communicators in the years following the crisis have developed their use of social media to optimise their and the public’s awareness of similar crises. Our semi-structured interviews with key emergency managers and responders display how the terrorist-induced crisis in 2011 was a wake-up call for communicators in the police and the health sector. They reflect on the significance, strengths and weaknesses of social media in the management of crises such as this one.

The purpose of this article is to explore how participants with different motivations (educational or leisure), familiarity with the medium (newbies and active Twitter users), and participating instructions respond to a highly structured digital social reading (DSR) activity in terms of intensity of engagement and social interaction.

A case study involving students and teachers of 211 Italian high school classes and 242 other Twitter users, who generated a total of 18,962 tweets commenting on a literary text, was conducted. The authors performed both a quantitative analysis focusing on the number of tweets/retweets generated by participants and a network analysis exploiting the study of interactions between them. The authors also classified the tweets with respect to their originality, by using both automated text reuse detection approaches and manual categorization, to identify quotations, paraphrases and other forms of reader response.

The decoupling (both in space and time) of text read (in class) and comments (on Twitter) likely led users to mainly share text excerpts rather than original personal reactions to the story. There was almost no interaction outside the classroom, neither with other students nor with generic Twitter users, characterizing this project as a shared experience of “audiencing” a media event. The intensity of social interactions is more related to the breadth of the audience reached by the user-generated content and to a strong retweeting activity. In general, better familiarity with digital (social) media is related to an increase in the level of social interaction.

The authors analyzed one of the largest educational social reading projects ever realized, contributing to the still scarce empirical research about DSR. The authors employed state-of-the-art automated text reuse detection to classify reader response.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication is becoming increasingly important for brands and companies. Social media such as Twitter may be platforms particularly suited to this topic, given their ability to foster dialogue and content diffusion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors driving the effectiveness of CSR communication on Twitter, with a focus on the communication strategies and elements of storytelling.

Using a sample of 281,291 tweets from top global companies in the food sector, automated content analysis (including supervised machine learning) was used to investigate the influence of CSR communication, emotion, and aspirational talk on the likelihood that Twitter users will retweet and like tweets from the companies.

The findings highlight the importance of aspirational talk and engaging users in CSR messages. Furthermore, the study revealed that the companies and brands on Twitter that tweeted more frequently about CSR were associated with higher overall levels of content diffusion and endorsement.

This study provides important insights into key aspects of communicating about CSR issues on social networking sites such as Twitter and makes several practical recommendations for companies.

This study aims to explore Twitter posts of Turkish government agencies and the public under a specific hashtag, #NotHolidayButDistanceEducation, specifically related to online distance education during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This study used a thematic analysis on 22,547 original tweets posted by 6,970 users during the first month of online distance education in Turkish K-12 schools. Based on like and retweet counts, the study further explored the extent of stakeholders’ engagement with the observed themes.

The findings showed that government agencies and citizens used Twitter to provide technical and psychological support, appreciate and motivate stakeholders, demonstrate sample distance education activities, share information and offer suggestions about the ongoing online distance education. It was also observed that the hashtag has been used for expressing negative views about online distance education and for political purposes. A positive relationship was found between social media engagement and providing technical support or sharing information for online distance education.

This study highlights the role of social media in providing practical and emotional support to education stakeholders in times of crisis. Thus, governments can use social media to provide evidence-based psychological and physical health support to their citizens during a pandemic. Social media can serve to improve education practices in schools through the interactions between the public and policymakers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study can be considered unique because it demonstrates the civic use of social media for educational crisis management. This study highlights the influence of social media in educational policy and practice development in the contemporary era.

This paper aims to present a deep understanding of how social media affects organisations’ sustainability performance, using environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. Particularly, this paper assumes the existence of a causal relationship between organisations’ sustainability performance and the use of their social media profile (i.e. Twitter).

The authors used a multivariate regression with an explorative approach. Using Thomson Reuters Eikon, the authors composed a sample of 115 public EU companies with a headquarter in Europe operating in the “energy” and “utilities” sectors. The authors collected ESG-related, financial and Twitter-related data covering the period 2016–2019.

The study findings emphasise the existence of a statistically significant and positive relationship between social media profiles (i.e. Twitter) and companies’ sustainability performance. Findings show that ESG-oriented companies use their Twitter profile more as a tool for achieving a higher level of legitimation rather than for managing their sustainability strategy and related performance. Therefore, social media contribute more to the construction of companies’ CSR identity than the management of analytic aspects of sustainability performance. The longevity of companies’ profiles is the variable mostly showing a causal relationship not only with the general measure of companies’ sustainability performance but also with its pillars and sub-pillars.

This research is original in showing academics, practitioners and policymakers results on the impact of different modalities of interaction (retweets, replies, likes and quotes) between organisations and stakeholders by using social media on sustainability performance.