The Interactivity of Twitwar among Social Media Influencer and Followers on Twitter

Abstract

Social media has been used not only as an interactive media for its individual users but also for business purposes. With the intentions to persuade the followers, social media account owners are using social media influencer with different objectives. Interactions with the followers cannot be avoided with comment and other features for every post uploaded by the account holder. The study is focusing the research on Twitter and aims to describe the response of social media influencers (SMIs) to face the twitwar. SMI as an actor in social media plays a role in influencing follower through his/her social relations and tweets on Twitter. SMI activities in social media such as updating status (tweet), retweet, replying in comments, liking, or debating with followers which tends to create the twitwar between SMI and with followers.

Using a qualitative method with phenomenology approach, the researchers recruited six informants purposively who have experience in having a war on tweets (twitwar) with another user in the same platform of social media. The research viewed and analyzed the data from the perspective of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. The results revealed that informants had various responses on how to manage the twitwar on Twitter. The response of SMIs for the public issues is not take it as personal, assume as a joke, or being silent and reduce tweets on particular topic. The response of SMIs for the personal issues is blocking the follower, change the topic of discussion, or never replying back the comments on Twitter.