How Social Media can Foster Professional Knowledge Exchange

In professional life, knowledge exchange plays an important role. This article describes the role that social media - company-intern enterprise social networks as well as publicly available social media such as Xing or Twitter - can play in this process. Social media make it easier to maintain a large and diverse network and provide thereby a precondition for knowledge exchange. For actual knowledge exchange, the recognition of expertise and trust plays an important role. First, general findings on impression formation and relationship formation on social media are described, followed by an explanation of how communication on social media can help to identify and approach experts. The initial results of studies that examine these processes are presented and desiderata in research conducted to date are identified.