Stakeholder engagement and SDGs: the role of social media in the European context
ISSN: 1450-2194
Article publication date: 25 March 2022
Issue publication date: 24 February 2023
Abstract
Purpose
The authors aim to investigate which social media posts' characteristics result in higher stakeholder engagement in the European context.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) method to categorize social media posts based on their engagement levels. The authors conduct analysis on the tweets published in 2019 by companies that draw up and publish a sustainability report on Global Reporting (www.globalreporting.org). The final sample is based on 3,045 tweets from 173 firms of different industries and countries.
Findings
The authors find that tweet characteristics, such as content type, industry type and country of a firm, significantly influence stakeholder engagement rate.
Practical implications
The findings are useful for practitioners and stakeholders. Firm management should consider the most important Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) concerning their business activities for engaging stakeholders and contributing to sustainable development.
Originality/value
The authors consider stakeholder theory and contribute to stakeholder engagement and sustainability debate. For this purpose, the authors focus on firms' communication of SDGs through social media. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which considers the SDGs’ communication to determine the most significant SDGs resulting in higher stakeholder engagement.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Authors are very thankful to the Editor in Chief for his support and guidance and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Authors are also thankful to all participants in the 14th Annual Conference of the EuroMed Academy of Business for their valuable suggestions on earlier version of this paper.
Citation
Mehmood, A., Hajdini, J., Iaia, L., De Luca, F. and Sakka, G. (2023), "Stakeholder engagement and SDGs: the role of social media in the European context", EuroMed Journal of Business, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 111-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/EMJB-11-2021-0173
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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