Use of Abbreviations in Social Media Accounts of Public Officials and Their Impact on Communication Effectiveness

Abstract

This research aims to describe the type of abbreviation and the process of forming abbreviations used by public officials in their personal social media accounts. This research is qualitative in nature because the data taken are in the form of words or sentences contained in the tweets of 10 national-level public officials on their respective twitter accounts. The data collection technique uses a note-taking technique, namely marking and recording tweets from the accounts of public officials using abbreviations to then be classified based on the five types of abbreviations, namely abbreviations, acronyms, contractions, fragments, and letter symbols. The results showed that the most widely used type of abbreviation in social media accounts of public officials was abbreviations, while the least used was contraction. Likewise, letter preservation is the most common abbreviation formation process due to its easy and simple formation process. Furthermore, it was also found that other forms of abbreviation were used, namely: (1) affixation of abbreviations; (2) reduplication of abbreviations; (3) combination of abbreviations; (4) elimination of abbreviations; and (5) abbreviation of shorts; and merging of abbreviations is the most dominant one found because the more merging of several abbreviations is done, the more space and time will be saved on social media.