Facebook@Work - The Use of Social Media for Work-related Exchange and Support

Research on informal Social Networks such as Facebook has so far mainly focused on participants’ private exchange, addressing topics like self-disclosure, self-presentation, privacy issues and so on. However, informal Social Networks, despite their more private nature, might also be used for work-related exchange and private support for workplace challenges and problems. In this paper we investigate to what extent informal Social Networks are used for work-related exchange and whether this is related to forms of social support the participants experience. To that end an online survey was conducted among users of Facebook. Results show that while work-related Facebook use is generally low, there is some potential to use Social Networks as a vehicle to build a strong support network for seeking of valuable information and advice to cope with possible work-related challenges, especially as participants showed a high willingness to extend help and support to other users.

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