Virtual Embeddedness of Platform Companies on Social Media

Embeddedness refers to the fact that social relationships under an industrial context affect organizational activities and outcomes. The emergence of the Internet and the advance of communication technologies have promoted the concept of virtual embeddedness, which combines the ideas of structural embeddedness and virtuality. In the era of social media, the connection between organizations and the formation of virtual communities in social media platforms, such as Facebook, have been facilitated by social media affordances. More specifically, companies can be embedded in their online networks through different kinds of affiliation linkages, for example, liking one another’s pages on Facebook. The advances of the Internet and technologies are not only changing the way in which actors in the industry interact, but also enable the emergence of a new market, the (digital) platform market The thesis aims to examine the pressure of embeddedness and isomorphism to activities of organizations on social media by analyzing the Facebook liking networks and topic modeling of platform companies in their population. A qualitative mixed-methods approach that includes some digital methods – network analysis and topic modeling – is applied. Overall, the finding reveals that the Facebook liking networks of the focal companies are sparse and fragmented, indicating the organizations in the networks are less connected. However, in the companycompany network via topics the companies are linked with one another, indicating that they are embedded by the overlapping topics. The expectation that the companies become similar to each other via online content (i.e. topics) due to the pressure of embeddedness and isomorphism happens. In addition, the findings reveal that the companies in the network also manage to resist the isomorphism by topic misalignments, which make them distinctive in relation to others in their networks.