Parasocial relationships and Twitter

While I was watching Helene Auramo’s interview about Twitter in YLE news earlier today, Helene mentioned something that caught my ear. She was talking about celebrities who are tweeting and this way their fans can feel closer to their idols.

This reminded me about uses and gratifications research, which studies why do people use media and what do they use them for. While uses and gratifications research is an influential tradition in mass media research, it might be fun to study social media through its theoretical perspective.

Uses and gratifications approach emphasizes motives and the self-perceived needs of audience members and there is not only one way that people uses media. Denis McQuail (1983) has classified four common reasons for media use:

• Entertainment – People are using media for relaxing, escaping from problems and emotional release.
• Integration and Social Interaction – Media can help maintaining social roles, enabling one to connect with family, friends and society and having a substitute for real-life companionship. Also media consumption helps finding a basis for conversation and social interaction.
• Personal Identity – With media people can reinforce their personal values, find models of behavior and identify with valued others (in the media). Media can also help to gain insight into oneself.
• Information – Using media to find information might be the most obvious use case for media.

One of the most interesting aspects of McQuail’s classifications is the notion that people are using media for having a substitute for real-life companionship. In TV-series and films people have usually their favorite characters and actors. Parasocial relationship or parasocial interaction is a term to describe these one-sided, parasocial interpersonal relationships in which one party knows a great deal about the other, but the other does not (Horton & Wohl, 1956). The most common form of such relationships are one-sided relations between celebrities and audience or fans.

The theory of parasocial relationships becomes quite interesting while examining Twitter with it. In Twitter you can find bunch of big celebrities with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers. If you have used Twitter, you know that there is no way to interact constantly with all of your followers when you have reached certain limit. This is why at some point Twitter transforms from personal medium to mass medium for some popular tweeters. But this doesn’t prevent celebrities to reply to the tweet of their followers. Twitter has a possibility for interaction which is missing from traditional mass media. This kind of possibility and activity might make parasocial relationships even stronger. One reply from the star doesn’t build real relationship.

Studies also show that the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention (Huberman, Romero & Wu, 2009). Even if people are following or their have plenty of followers or friends, they are only interacting with few other users. It seems that there are plenty of parasocial relationships in Twitter.

If I study my own behaviors in Twitter and my common reasons for the usage, McQuail’s four categories make sense, even if they were results of mass media research. My main drivers to use Twitter is to connect with friends and to find interesting information. The results seems to be even too self-evidence and this has been one of the main critiques against uses and gratifications research.

Horton, Donald; R. Richard Wohl (1956). “Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance”. Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–229. republished.
McQuail, D. (1983). Mass Communication Theory (1st ed.). London: Sage.
Huberman, A. Romero, D. M. & Wu, F. (2009) Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 1 – 5 January 2009

Finnish PR wire services are tweeting

Twitter is getting more traction also in Finland. Jaiku is fading away and more and more Finns are joining Twitter. (Follow me in Twitter!)

Now at least two Finnish PR agencies have been testing out how to use Twitter. Cision Wire Finland and Net Profile are both feeding links to press releases of their clients in Twitter.

Curretly these accounts have only handful or no followers. Cision seems to have created Twitter accounts to all of their Nordic markets. Netprofile is tweeting about their clients, so it is not really a PR wire. I guess these activities are mainly done for SEO at the moment. (There’s no traditional SEO value, because nofollow link values.) This kind of usage of Twitter is a quite traditional push-PR.

If you are interested to know how to use Twitter in an effective way for public relations, I recommend you to read about MicroPR. The main reason behind MircoPR is to force PR firms to approach bloggers and other social media voices in the open using open social flow apps like Twitter. MircoPR also enforces PR agencies to jettison the old press release model with all the claptrap. In MicroPR bloggers, journalists, analysts, send a public message @MicroPR when you want to reach PR professionals. This approach enables a broader, more effective network of resources for stories today and in the future.

Make sure also to read an another great post by Brian Solis about Twitter tools for community and communications professionals.