The rapid diffusion of 'microblogging' services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates-'information,''community,' and 'action.' Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community-building practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media appears to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] .

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Although public relations scholarship has often discussed the possibilities of dialogue and engagement using social media, research has not truly explored this dynamic. Instead, research on social media platforms has focused on measuring the content and structure of organizational profiles.

Through a content analysis of 225 nonprofit organizations' Facebook profiles, the current study examines the impact of cultural orientation when it comes to American, Chinese, and Turkish nonprofit organizations' behavior and communication patterns in the social media sphere. Specifically, the research explored how organizations disclose information about themselves and those managing their Facebook presence, promoting organizational news and accomplishments, and stakeholder engagement in relation to their context, performance, and collectivist/individualist natures, respectively. The study found mixed support for the impact of traditional cultural expectations indicating that the global connectivity of social media may be contributing to blurred cultural boundaries in favor of a virtual culture that promotes the global community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] .

This study examines what drives organizational adoption and use of social media through a model built around four key factors - strategy, capacity, governance and environment. Using Twitter, Facebook, and other data on 100 large US nonprofit organizations, the model is employed to examine the determinants of three key facets of social media utilization: (1) adoption, (2) frequency of use and (3) dialogue.