A Framework for Examining B2B Digital Communication

Abstract

The use of these social media has grown rapidly over the last decade. For example, the social media site LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and now connects over 100 million business people including director level or higher employees at 499 of the fortune 500. Using communication and relationship marketing theory, we develop a framework to examine social media’s impact on business-to-business relationships. The framework will be used to examine the channel of communication, the content of messages, the level of interactivity, and the number of contacts within and between firms and how these dimensions of interactive communication influence the relational outcomes.