Is New York Better Served (Tweeted) than Glendive, MT?: A Comparative Study of Local Broadcasters’ Twitter Uses in Two Different Markets.

In the age of broadband, 4G wireless, app-based mobile devices and networked audience, the discussion of one-directional ‘broadcasting’ and its future sound to some extent outdated and irrelevant. Especially, over-the-air broadcasting is becoming merely one of many distribution paths to reach audiences, and only smaller audiences wait one-directional “appointment” broadcasting programs. On the other hand, more audience equipped with various portable devices easily gets connected to wireless broadband networks that provide a wide array of information and voices. In addition, the digitalized broadband media environment has been developing more participatory media platforms based on social networking technologies. Without doubt, broadcasters have been trying to grapple with the challenges both from structural and functional aspect. Although the importance of over-the-air broadcasting has been gradually dwindled in the entire media market, significant contribution of local broadcasters to serving informational needs in local communities cannot be denied (FCC, 1999). Regarding local television’s Twitter use for promotion and branding, Greer and Ferguson (2011) examined Twitter sites of 488 local television stations in the U.S. to identify the relationship between stations status and content of stations’ Twitter sites. They found that most of the local television stations offer news stories, but barely direct viewers to their actual on-air programming. In their other study (Ferguson and Greer, 2011), they analyzed 111 local radio stations’ Twitter sites to understand how local radio stations use microblogging service in their business. The previous studies successfully demonstrate the current status of how Twitter is used among local broadcasters, but they do not capture any differences among local broadcaster with different systematic conditions. This research will empirically analyze how local broadcasters from different conditions utilize social network platform (especially, Twitter) to adapt to digitalized interactive media environment. Local broadcasters’ social media performance for local needs can be differed because American local broadcast markets are diversified according to market size (Designated Market Area) and funding system (commercial vs. public), and station ownership. Thus, the scope of this research is limited to two extreme cases. As for comparative analysis, two different groups of local broadcasters have been chosen for the study – one group from Nielsen’s top 20 DMA and another group from bottom 20 DMA. Two different groups of local broadcasters’ Twitter uses will be analyzed to address the differences in Twitter uses between public and commercial stations, and between high-resourced (top DMA) and low-resourced (bottom DMA) market. In order to investigate the local broadcasters’ local service activities in social network platform, Twitter, two main methods will be implemented. First, online survey will be used to collect qualitative and quantitative information about the inquiry items directly from the studied population. Especially, an online survey has various advantages (convenience, low administration cost, and controlled sampling) over the traditional survey methods (Evans & Mathur, 2005). In addition to the online survey, additional websites research will fill the gap to precisely delineate the current social media adoption of the local broadcasters. Second, content analysis (Herring, 2012; Greer & Ferguson, 2011) examine the tweets items of local broadcasters accounts regarding numerical frequencies of content for each category. The data for content analysis, tweets and their information will be manually and systematically collected through Twitter accounts.