Benefits of professional social media use

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sonja Utz
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 437132708

Research on social media has mainly focused on effects on well-being and neglected the benefits than can be retrieved from using social media for professional purposes, such as timely access to information or stimulation of creativity. Prior work has either examined how social media use affects the size and structure of a person’s network or focused on information processing. Ambient awareness, the knowledge about who-knows-what in one’s network information derived from regularly skimming social media posts is considered promising because ambient processes happen relatively effortless.The aim of this project is to bring these two levels of analysis of work together. It aims to get a deeper understanding of the effects of social media use for professional purposes by looking at interpersonal and intrapersonal processes: how connecting with other people on social media also is an act of shaping one’s information environment and how information in social media feeds is subsequently processed. We connect these two processes by looking at the role of networking behavior. We argue that networking affects on the one hand size and composition of the online network and shapes thereby the content of the social media news feed. On the other hand, we propose that better networkers also use social media more frequently and/or more efficiently and develop therefore more ambient awareness. The second goal is to explore the different temporal dynamics of the processes explaining how social media use increases informational benefits and creativity. Building and maintaining a network pays off in the long run, whereas the benefits of information processing are assumed to occur in the short-term. The third goal is to further explore the accuracy and the automatic vs. controlled nature of ambient awareness.To test the model and consider the different temporal dynamics, we will conduct a measurement burst field study that combines experience sampling and longitudinal surveys. We will follow a sample of professionals over a period of one year. Every third months, changes in their online networks, ambient awareness, informational benefits and creativity will be assessed. Additionally, we will have two measurement burst periods – phases on experience sampling in which participants report over one work week twice a day their social media use and informational benefits and creativity. This allows us to disentangle short-time effects from effects that unfold over time. To examine the accuracy of ambient awareness, we will conduct first a field study of active Twitter users and extend our prior work by assessing not only self-reported ambient awareness, but by also judging the accuracy of these ratings. In a series of experiments, we will use established methods from social cognition to explore whether ambient awareness is rather an automatic or rather a controlled process. Networking will be measured in all these studies and related to accuracy of ambient awareness.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants