| Abstract [eng] |
As the competition and globalization increase, organizations begin to understand the benefits of effective corporate communication. Consistent communicating and building trust is the most important points of corporate communication as it gets more strategic importance in any corporation. As more companies focus on transparency, morality and sincere communication with stakeholders, it is useful to critically assess communication channels they use. It is worth to analyze new possibilities of social media. Analysing the scientific literature, using theoretical methods has led to the conclusion that corporate communication is a complex discipline, most associated with corporate image, corporate reputation, corporate brand and corporate identity, as a base for all those three. The analysis of scientific monographs and research concluded that, social media which provides interactions and feedback is very helpful for the strategic goals of corporate communication and for reaching various stakeholders. Simply informing stakeholders helps to build trust and relationships, which is crucial for corporate communication. Social media provides not only that, but helps to reach nishe and geographically separated target groups and contact them in one virtual place. Research was made in two phases, using both quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods. Results proved that the Lithuanian companies posses tremendous differences (comparing to American entrepreneurs) in social media usage. The assortiment of social media tools is also different. It was found that the most popular social media tool in Lithuania among the biggest companies is "Facebook". It was selected for the second phase of the research, to find out what kind of communication dominates in it. It was found, that the biggest part of communication consists of corporate news (54.78 percent), but marketing information forms also a big part – 45.22 per cent. in "Facebook" profiles of Lithuanian companies. Most often companies exploit "Facebook" for expertise demonstrations, also it is used to present products or services and to influence attractive workplace image. Consumer involvement in the communicative process is not vivid, the communication is not intensive, some companies have even restricted opportunities to communicate for users. In average, company generates 1 message per day. It was found that Lithuanian companies use a variety of information formats on "Facebook" - the most popular is linking to websites and other sources, in the second place – using photos to illustrate the entries. Textual information alone provides only a quarter of companies. Work can be a useful for corporate communication and media students and professors, corporate communication professionals, entrepreneurs. |
