Characterizing the interactions of a multinational engineering services company on Twitter

For organizations, social media systems (SMSs) provide new means for communication and collaboration with many classes of external stakeholders. As an industry based on knowledge and design, it is not surprising that the engineering sector has adopted SMSs of various types to improve the flow of information, and the collaboration, between its workers, and with its external stakeholders. Twitter (twitter.com) is one widely-used social media tool employed by individuals and organizations. Recent social media research has proposed content analysis as an important element of understanding what is being shared by participants in social media ‘conversations’. The work presented here uses publicly available data for analysis and visualization to characterize the engagement of a multinational engineering services company on the Twitter SMS. Specifically, it uses text analytics and visualization to address the proposal in the research literature that content analysis of tweet text will be a useful approach to characterizing the high-level online conversations taking place on Twitter. The research presented here provides useful insights, as well as offering a methodology for future work.