Stuck with ‘electronic brochures’? How boundary management strategies shape politicians’ social media use

ABSTRACT

Social media provide new opportunities for politicians, such as personalized communication directed at specific communities of interest. Yet despite potential benefits, empirical analyses show that politicians tend to shy away from an active engagement of online audiences. This study explores the effect of politicians’ online boundary management on their use of social media. Ties maintained through social media profiles can be embedded in diverse social contexts (‘context collapse’). Professional communicators, especially, are faced with the challenge of managing boundaries between professional and private online self-presentations. Based on a survey of 106 German members of parliament, we distinguish four types of boundary management strategies. We analyze the effects of these strategies on politicians’ social media use practices – and find that considering boundary management strategies allows for a better understanding of politicians’ online engagement (or lack thereof).

KEYWORDS:

• Political communication
• social media
• context collapse
• boundary management
• survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Christian Pieter Hoffmann is a professor of communication management and political communication at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Leipzig. His research interests focus on online communication, trust, self-disclosure and privacy protection in social media. His work has been published in journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems; Information, Communication & Society; Journal of Public Affairs; Journal of Information Technology & Politics and International Journal of Communication [Email: [email protected]].

Anne Suphan is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Hohenheim, Germany. She received her PhD in Organization Studies and Cultural Theory from University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. Her research interests include social media, digital divide, digital sociology and visual research methods. In 2013, she was a visiting scholar at Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University, New York [Email: [email protected]].