Social Media Choice: An Explorative Study on Information Transmission via Social Media

From Facebook (i.e. a social network site) to Twitter (i.e. a microblog), a large variety of social media types and platforms facilitate information exchange among individuals. The information systems literature provides theoretical approaches to understand media choice, especially when multiple electronic media are available.In this empirical study, we seek to understand social media choice in the context of major business events.We explore how individuals make use of different social media types at different times during the communication process subsequent to the announcement of major business events. While controlling for other task-related influencing factors, our analysis provides evidence that the successive choices of social media types determine the task-related communication process.