Twitter as an engagement tool: How Public Benefit Organizations are building relationships with their audience

Abstract

The current study applies content analysis to scrutinize the relationship between Twitter messaging tactics employed by 186 Public Benefit Organizations (PBO) and public reactions in the form of liking, retweeting and commenting behaviour. The results indicate that Twitter plays a marginal role in the Polish PBO, and it seems to be at most complementary to the much more frequently utilized Facebook. Furthermore, the size of the organization does not affect the frequency of the published content on Twitter. Multiple regression analysis indicated that the most important factor influencing audience engagement was the Twitter profile number of followers. It explained the largest percentage of variance in terms of the average number of retweets, the average number of likes, and the percentage of tweets that were then commented on.