Twitter at the hands of the church

Abstract This qualitative study analysed how the Church utilised Twitter. The empirical material consisted of 937 individual tweets published in early 2017 and classified into three categories: tweets published by the Church, tweets published by other organisations and tweets published by individual persons. The latter two groups were re-tweeted by the Church reasoning their role as empirical research material. At the time of the study, the most topical issues were asylum seekers, equal-marriage laws and human rights. Qualitative content analysis was performed following a step-by-step approach. Networking was identified as the strategy for utilising social media. The results also showed that the way the Church acted in social media was interactive. The Church tweeted openly and encouraged people to join discussions