use of social media in construction industry a case study

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Use of social media in construction industry: a case study.

Perera, s.; victoria, m.f.; brand, s..

Dr Michele Victoria [email protected] Lecturer

Contributors

Charles Egbu Editor

Social media evolved in the early 2000's with the birth of Facebook and Flickr in 2004. It is hard to ignore the current influence of social media upon modern lifestyle with the continuous development of many social media platforms over the past decade. On the other hand, the construction industry is often criticised for lack of communication and poor uptake of technology and innovation. Hence, this study reviewed and analysed the usage of social media in the UK construction industry focusing on quantity surveying practices. Three Quantity Surveying practices were selected for the study. Of the three cases, one organisation was selected as the principal case study within which a comprehensive questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the level of understanding and knowledge of employees about social media within the organisation. The other two organisations were used for verification of findings from the main case study. The case study findings revealed a very low usage of social media within the organisations. Even though there was a mixture of positive and negative views on the commercial potential of social media for construction business, the questionnaire findings suggested that the social media platforms were poorly understood by the employees and its potential is underestimated.

PERERA, S., VICTORIA, M.F. and BRAND, S. 2015. Use of social media in construction industry: a case study. In Egbu, C. (ed.) Proceedings of the 2015 CIB international conference (CIB2015): going north for sustainability: leveraging knowledge and innovation for sustainable construction and development, 23-25 November 2015, London, UK. London: IBEA Publications [online], pages 462-473. Available from: http://www.irbnet.de/daten/iconda/CIB_DC28892.pdf

PERERA 2015 Use of social media in construction (1.1 Mb) PDF

Publisher Licence URL https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management

ISSN : 0969-9988

Article publication date: 16 March 2021

Issue publication date: 10 February 2022

Although social media has been increasingly applied and valued in the construction industry, there has been little evidence revealing the influence mechanism of social media use in the construction context. In this way, this paper aims to explore how different purposes of social media use affect project performance from a project manager's perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on the mechanism–outcome–performance framework, this paper developed a research model to figure out the mechanism through which work-oriented and socialization-oriented social media use influences construction project performance. The empirical data were collected from a survey of 249 construction project managers, and the structural equation modeling technique was applied to test the proposed model.

Results indicate that both work-oriented and socialization-oriented social media use promote knowledge acquisition and project social capital, which both further positively impact the project performance. Additionally, the negative moderating role of information overload is identified on the relationship between social media use and knowledge acquisition.

Originality/value

This study fulfills the need for an in-depth investigation of social media use on construction project performance, contributing to the project management and social media literature. Furthermore, this study provides recommendations for project managers to advance social media applications in the construction domain.

• Social media
• Project performance
• Project manager
• Knowledge acquisition
• Social capital

Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71671128).

Ma, G. , Jiang, S. and Wang, D. (2022), "Understanding the effects of social media use on construction project performance: a project manager's perspective", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management , Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 551-570. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-12-2020-1014

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