Examining how the subject position of marketing professionals and customers are constructed through Twitter communication by B2B organisations

The purpose of this research is to examine the management of organisational Twitter sites from the perspective of UK marketing professionals, within five B2B case-study organisations. Specifically this study examines how these marketing professionals as ‘organisational storytellers’ engage in a process to communicate the official organisational story to customers, while maintaining an element of their personal identities, due to the less formal and brief (140 character) nature of tweets. Adopting an abductive, interpretivist research design, this study initially analysed the content of tweets from five B2B Twitter sites over a three-month period, utilising a corporate web identity framework (Elliott & Robinson, 2013). The tweet examination informed the qualitative interviews with 15 marketing communications professionals across the five case-study organisations. The emerging results suggest a purposeful unification of personal/organisational identities as more marketing professionals are tweeting from personal Twitter feeds into the organisational site, to achieve greater interaction with customers.