TY - JOUR
T1 - Can social media improve stakeholder engagement and communication of Sustainable Development Goals? A cross-country analysis
AU - De Luca, Francesco
AU - Iaia, Lea
AU - Mehmood, Asad
AU - Vrontis, Demetris
N1 - Funding Information:
We are very thankful to the Editors in Chief for their support and guidance and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2022/4
Y1 - 2022/4
N2 - Social media, based on information and communication technologies (ICTs), work as new channels to exchange information among stakeholders and play role in improving stakeholder engagement. Considering this aspect, we investigated the characteristics of social media posts that result in higher stakeholder engagement in the European context, and we determined which of the 17 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) result in greater stakeholder engagement. We apply chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) method to categorize social media posts based on their engagement levels. We analyzed tweets that companies published in 2019 on Twitter that also publish sustainability reports on Global Reporting Initiative. The final sample is based on 3,045 tweets from 173 firms of different industries and countries. We found that tweet characteristics such as content type (SDGs), use of hashtags, existence of link, number of characters, industry type and country of a firm significantly influence stakeholder engagement rates. The most significant SGDs are partnerships for the goals, climate action, reduced inequalities, life below water, life on land, and gender equality. This is the first study which considers the communication of SDGs by firms through social media to determine which SDGs are considered most relevant and promote higher stakeholder engagement.
AB - Social media, based on information and communication technologies (ICTs), work as new channels to exchange information among stakeholders and play role in improving stakeholder engagement. Considering this aspect, we investigated the characteristics of social media posts that result in higher stakeholder engagement in the European context, and we determined which of the 17 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) result in greater stakeholder engagement. We apply chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) method to categorize social media posts based on their engagement levels. We analyzed tweets that companies published in 2019 on Twitter that also publish sustainability reports on Global Reporting Initiative. The final sample is based on 3,045 tweets from 173 firms of different industries and countries. We found that tweet characteristics such as content type (SDGs), use of hashtags, existence of link, number of characters, industry type and country of a firm significantly influence stakeholder engagement rates. The most significant SGDs are partnerships for the goals, climate action, reduced inequalities, life below water, life on land, and gender equality. This is the first study which considers the communication of SDGs by firms through social media to determine which SDGs are considered most relevant and promote higher stakeholder engagement.
KW - CHAID
KW - European firms
KW - SDGs
KW - Social media
KW - Stakeholder engagement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123609188&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121525
DO - 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121525
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85123609188
SN - 0040-1625
VL - 177
JO - Technological Forecasting and Social Change
JF - Technological Forecasting and Social Change
M1 - 121525
ER -