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The growth of social media has dramatically reshaped the entire landscape of public relations. For example, a majority of public relations practitioners (82 percent) said they utilize social media for general public relations practice and about 50 percent use it for crisis management (Wigley and Zhang, 2011). It is because social media provide practitioners enormous opportunities to directly engage publics as a result of interactive characteristics (Kelleher and Miller, 2006; Yang and Lim, 2009) and the personalizing aspect of becoming fans or followers of companies (Kelleher and Miller, 2006; Sweetser, 2010). With the growing emphasis on social media, how to effectively utilize this new media environment has become one of the most important topics in public relations scholarship and practice (Ye and Ki, 2012).
Among social networking sites, Facebook (FB) is the most popular, outstripping MySpace with more than 900 million active users worldwide (Goldman, 2012; Wilcox et al., 2011). Since more publics are migrating into social media, FB fan pages have become companies’ largest web presences and corporate messages posted on FB command a higher click-through rate than corporate web sites (Champoux et al., 2012; Klaassen, 2009; Neff, 2010; Shankland, 2011). Many companies are experiencing increased social media popularity among publics (Champoux et al., 2012; Pew Internet Research, 2011; Shankland, 2011). According to a recent survey by Pew Internet Research (2011), 65 percent of adults used at least one social networking site in 2011, a 36 percent increase from 2008 (29 percent). This trend leads companies to prioritize social media while keeping existing web sites and traditional communication tools to interact with their publics. Therefore, how successfully companies incorporate existing corporate communication strategies into new mainstream social media is a key to organization-public relationship growth.
However, little is known about how corporations use FB to cultivate relationships with publics especially in terms of incorporating existing corporate communication strategies and prioritizing certain stakeholders over the others in social media outlets. For example, are corporations employing consistent corporate communication strategies for their FB pages as they do for their web sites or traditional media or adopting different strategies? A study exploring Fortune 500 companies’ web sites found that corporations with large revenue emphasized a corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy (focussing on building...