Digitising Public Relations Practice: A Content Analysis of the Twitter Pages of Selected Organisations in Ghana

Abstract

This study was conducted to examine how organisations in Ghana used Twitter as a public relations medium to interact with their stakeholders. The primary focus of the study was to analyse how Twitter posts conformed to the relationship indicators propounded by Hon and Grunig (1999) as well as Grunig and Hunt's (1984) public relations models. The study employed both qualitative and quantitative content analysis to gather and analyse the tweets of TV3, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), Consolidated Bank Ghana and Fidelity Bank on their respective Twitter accounts. Guided by Hon and Grunig's (1999) relationship indicators and the two models of Grunig and Hunt (1984), the study revealed that the organisations engaged in interactive activities such as posting original tweets, retweeting other Twitter account users' posts or the organisations' past posts, and replying to other account users' tweets. The study also discovered that Twitter posts promoted some aspects of Grunig and Hunt's (1984) theoretical models. The majority of the organisations' tweets depicted press agentry and public information models. Moreover, the Twitter posts of the organisations also reflected Hon and Grunig's (1999) relationship indicators. The wordings employed in the text, the images and the videos posted carried meanings that were associated with at least one of the relationship indicators. The majority of the organisations' tweets conformed to control mutuality, commitment, exchange relationship and communal relationship.