Social Media and Organizations: An Integrative Review and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Social media have fundamentally reshaped how organizations and audiences interact, challenging theoretical assumptions in the management literature. With this integrative literature review, we take stock of a fragmented body of research, based on an analysis of 647 articles across 9 disciplines. Our synthesis identifies three dominant perspectives: an organization-centric perspective that views social media as tools for strategic action; an audience-centric perspective that emphasizes audience empowerment and contestation; and a platform-centric perspective that highlights how platform features and algorithms condition organizational outcomes and audience interactions. Building on these perspectives, we develop an integrative framework of organizational enablement, audience empowerment, and platform mediation that captures how social media extend and redirect established theories. We distill five major research areas—identity and community, social evaluations, corporate social responsibility, false narratives, and organizational outcome drivers—that capture the core themes of management scholarship to date. Our analysis shows how social media distinctiveness—heightened emotionality, many-to-many diffusion, and expanded actor visibility—has generated theoretical extensions while leaving key debates unresolved. We argue that management research must better integrate across perspectives, expand attention to platform mediation, and incorporate insights from related fields. We conclude with a bold future research agenda for researchers who aim to advance theorizing on organization audience relationships in a complex media ecosystem.