Ph.D. Candidate James Lannigan published an article in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society. The article, entitled, "Branding Practices in The New(Er) Media: A Comparison of Retailer Twitter and Web-Based Images,"compares the ways in which specialty coffee retailers use webpages and Twitter. Lannigan's research finds that retailers post twice as many pictures on their Twitter pages as compared to their webpages. Moreover, the scale of the retaileralso affects the volume of pictures per Twitter stream and webpage. However, on average, larger retailers are using visuals more often than their smaller counterparts, which promotes engagement with their branded visual identities. Overall, this suggests that retailers are putting more effort into developing a social media presence rather than traditional web-based approaches to advertising.
James Lannigan is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto and is currently conducting dissertation research on entrepreneurial networks, and examining how individuals, retailers, and institutions use social media.
I have posted the citation and the abstract below. The full text can be found on the ACM website.
Lannigan, James. 2017. “Branding practices in the new(er) media: A comparison of retailer Twitter and Web-Based images.” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society Article 46.
To date, there has been little empirical focus on how different online mediums affect the branding practices of retailers. In this working paper, I compare how specialty coffee retailers of different sizes use webpages and Twitter. I examine over 2800 unique images from 86 retailers using a quantitative content analysis that enumerates visual elements within pictures. I find that there are significant differences in the use of these two mediums in terms of retailer scale, and that based on their size, retailers display different types of images at much different proportions.