Organizations Don't Tweet, Employees Do!

The research presented in this paper explores government authorities’ use of social media. An exploratory approach has been used to identify characteristics of online interactions over an extended period of time. The data consists of communications and interactions of Twitter accounts belonging to a multitude of Swedish government authorities, ranging from top-level accounts of formal agencies, to accounts belonging to employees stating a formal position at a government agency. The findings show that there is a large diversity in the characteristics of government accounts. The focus of the paper is to presents an account type typology that represents government authorities presence on social media services. The authors believes that acknowledging these differences are an important step in theorizing the role of social media in crisis communication and for future research on social media use in emergency and crisis management practices