Use of social media by professional workers in the Basque region of northern Spain: a new way of networking

摘要

Companies' social media strategies have different objectives that are usually implemented by the marketing department and can therefore be said to pursue a communicational approach. Yet there are also many workers, both self-employed and employees, who use social networking sites for business purposes. This paper seeks to establish the use that these workers make of Web 2.0 tools in the professional field. We therefore conducted a survey among 283 workers from the Basque Country region in Spain to establish which specific Web 2.0 tools they are using and the possible statistical differences with certain variables related to the workers themselves and to the companies they work for. We also considered a series of studies that analysed the social media strategy conducted both by companies and by their workers.