Knowledge networks in social media

Knowledge exchange no longer occurs only in private email conversations, but also takes place on (semi-)public social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. These media help people maintaining and extending their social networks. They also expose users to a constant stream of tiny bits of information (e.g., news feeds). In this chapter, we examine how social media users can derive professional informational benefits from their online networks. We integrate sociological literature on social capital, organizational psychological literature on networking and social psychological research on impression formation. Results from a large-scale study on actual informational benefits of social media users show that especially users of business networks derive informational benefits. The role of platform usage, networking behavior and network composition was examined. In the second part, we present empirical work on the deliberate (expert search, who-knows-what) and ambient processes fostering informational benefits.