Quantifying Organizational Trust on Twitter: A Communication Perspective

This chapter draws on both theoretical and empirical literature on trust and discusses the role of trust in strategic communication. It also examines the importance of trust for organizational success, the dimensions of trust and distrust and discusses quantifiable proxies to measure trust and distrust on social media. The theoretically driven dimensions of trust and distrust served as a framework to examine how Boeing and Airbus use Twitter to communicate with their stakeholders and publics. 6,926 Twitter messages were examined in the process of content analysis. The following proxies of stakeholder and publics' trust in an organization were identified for Twitter: number of followers, friends and likes; frequency of online activities; length of messages; use of hashtags, links, exclamation and questions marks; and use of specific words and phrases in messages. Two separate lists of words and phrases were created, one for proxies of trust and one for proxies of distrust. In addition, the following trust building actions that organization can engage in on Twitter were identified: listening and engaging in dialogue by following users, mentioning users in messages, replying to enquiries, providing and encouraging feedback.