Beyond Demographics -- Explaining Diversity in Organizational Social Media Usage

Social media are continuously gaining ground in PR workplaces as Facebook, Twitter and Co. are on their way of becoming standard tools in professional communication. But even though PR is one of the pioneering fields in terms of social media acceptance, not all professionals make equal use of social media nor do they feel equally at home in the new social communication paradigm. On the basis of an online survey among 1579 PR practitioners from 30 European countries, we propose four clusters of social media users in professional communication. The results of our quantitative analysis show, that there are considerable differences among PR professionals in terms of the extent, purpose and virtuosity of their social media usage as well as their attitude towards social media in general. We also show that the differences in social media usage do not necessarily follow traditional demographic patterns of gender, position or age.