Companies on Facebook and Twitter. Current situation and communication strategies

Introduction. Given their influence, companies are being forced to integrate social networks in their communication strategies. Objectives. This article aims to provide an overview of the use of Facebook and Twitter by the main commercial brands in Spain and to analyse the communication strategies of the companies that tend to receive more complaints from the public. Method. The study is based on the examination of the social network accounts of the three brands with the highest advertising investment in each of the 15 industry sectors. A total of 5,433 tweets and 3,000 posts were analysed. Conclusions. The study confirmed the massive presence of these companies is the social networks and demonstrated the extreme variability of the number of followers, the traffic and the nature of the information published. However, it was also demonstrated that the use made of the different social networks and the communication strategies required by the different companies are distinguishable and identifiable.