Employees on social media — whose voice do we hear? Reading two cool studies

Social media has become a bit of a dumpster fire on most channels that I have been using, but even so I have a hard time letting go. I like the aspects of cultivating a big network, self-expression (btw, I wrote a blog post on some interesting research on that here) and professional branding. But posting online is always a balance between speaking for the organisation vs speaking for myself, and it plays out in very different ways depending on the channel. I am summarising two studies below that look at this conflict.

In Andersson, Heide, and Simonsson (2024), they look at employees representing an organisation online, and what shapes and controls what gets shared, and how. They start from the premise that “it is often taken for granted that coworkers act, should act or want to act as ambassadors of an organization”, as an “in-role behavior” rather than an extra role on top of the job. As ambassadors, employees then represent the organisation, but the way they represent it is shaped both by how they want to portrait it towards the inside and outside, and how they understand it, and their role in it, again both inwards and outwards.

In a study on the Swedish police force and their social media presence (how cool is that?! But I think it is 100% applicable to jobs in academia, too), they identify four sources of influence on how and what is expressed online:

• Management! The police force has a handbook that describes the target audience, use of imagery, etc. This is perceived as support rather than limiting, especially for beginners. Social media guidelines exist for most employers I have been involved with, and it can indeed be useful to know what the employer’s stance is. Usually, in my experience, there is a lot more leeway than I would have expected.
• Colleagues! Both through explicit feedback, and through unspoken/-written norms of how they present on social media, or react to what other people share.
• Significant non-members, i.e. followers. This can be through direct feedback in comments, reactions, (un)following of accounts, but additionally there is an element of self-discipline that comes with being a visible speaker to a mostly invisible audience.
• The status and position of the coworker’s voice. Some accounts were described as having a “near-celebrity status”, and those accounts are recognised as a communicator that can be made use of in for example emergencies

The balancing of those four factors, described as “freedom within certain limits”, results in four different types of voices:

1. the organisation’s voice on official accounts (this is what I am trying to do for my freediving club — I post news and updates, but without explicitly disclosing who I am, and also trying to really represent the club. That said, I wrote the “handbook” myself (in cooperation with the club, of course). However, when we repost from people’s private accounts (see 4 below) though, for those posts that are clearly visible as reposts we probably merge into 2:
2. the organisation’s voice through self-narratives (this is probably something like our LU Teaching for Sustainability blog, where we invite many different voices to represent the organisation)
3. the individual police officer’s voice on official accounts (this one I have a hard time relating to — I would find it very difficult to find a balance here, hence me choosing 4)
4. the police officer’s voice in private accounts (this is me on my blog and all my social media — I disclose my affiliation, but I am also very explicitly representing myself as an individual only)

In Sossini and Heide (2024), they look at the pressure towards self-branding that employees feel, and that contributes to them to become active on social media (in the sense of category 4 above — on private accounts). On many platforms, especially on LinkedIn, the norm and expectation is to connect private profiles to an employer, which then makes employees de facto ambassadors of their employer, whether they want it or not. In many cases, the social media presence is seen as crucial for self-branding both towards the employer themself and the wider world of collaborators and possible future employers. Employees feel the importance of the employer’s reputation, and how that and self-branding enhance each other. At the same time, they need to make sure they self-brand in a way that lets them stand out between all the other employees at the same employer.

On top of that, despite many having concerns regarding social media platforms (e.g. algorithms, data collection, possible repercussions that come from mistakes, …), employees report that they feel pressure to join. And in order to stand out, they feel that they need to be seen as “authentic”, which leads to an “authenticity paradox”: Employees report feeling that they have to share personal expression through e.g. selfies and personal stories, to enhance their credibility and authenticity; that “just” professional content is not enough. This leads to a  thinning line between private and professional lives. And while some employees have normalized this, others resist mixing their private and professional life. In any case, this leads to “a dilemma in which employees need to evaluate not only what they should post and whether they should post, but also how personal they should be to be considered “truly authentic.””, or an “exaggerated presentation of the self.” While juggling all of this, employees report 1. Strategizing through Self-Monitoring, i.e. employees are active on impression-management, filtering what they share. Do they, for example, sound too judgemental or opinionated or discriminatory? 2. Situational Silencing. Here, employees hold back negative aspects to avoid backlash. They might still share personal failures so that followers can learn from them, but not organisational failures.

I don’t really know what to take away from these articles yet, other than an increased awareness of the tensions that employees are faced with regarding activity on social media, and the realization that these tensions are a lot more systemic and a lot less individual than I previously thought of them. I don’t know if and when I’ll teach in a science communication course again, but I think it is helpful background information that these struggles are very common, and that there are also common strategies to deal with finding a good balance.

All of this said, I think I’ll go and check out bluesky now.

Andersson, R., Heide, M., & Simonsson, C. (2024). Voicing the organization on social media: Towards a nuanced understanding of coworker voice and sources of control. Journal of Communication Management, 28(2), 294-312.

Sossini, A., & Heide, M. (2024). Fear of being replaced: The dark side of employee ambassadorship on social media. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 29(7), 58-73.