Abstract
This paper presents an approach for analyzing the stakeholders from various organizations based on their Facebook activity. On a practical level, the proposed approach has been applied in two of the Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) with the largest number of delegations in the province of Cadiz: Red Cross Cadiz, and Caritas Asidonia Jerez. The purposes of the research are to describe the management of marketing activities on Facebook; to identify the network stakeholders, their roles in the communication, and the community generating factors; and to position organizations according to their leadership, activity, and popularity in the network. This study used a mixed-methods research design, combining personal interviews and Social Network Analysis (SNA). The SNA provided insights into the various ways the analyzed NGDOs are active on Facebook, the roles they play in communication, and how communities are generated. Moreover, the SNA made it possible to visualize the interactions between organizations and their stakeholders within the Facebook environment using the Gephi software package. Two factors that generate communities were detected in the results: the organization’s nature and its geographical location. Moreover, two solutions were proposed to determine the organizations’ positioning according to their roles in communication. Consequently, two maps were created, a two-dimensional map with the activity and popularity of the parameters, which shows that just because an NGDO is active does not mean it is popular (in terms of receiving “likes”), and a second three-dimensional graph to which a leadership parameter was added. In this last map, four groups of important actors can be seen, with one group formed by the organizations with the best ratings on the three dimensions, and the other three with a low level of leadership in common but who were different in terms of the popularity and activity dimensions.
Highlights
In order to shed some light on these issues, we developed the proposed approach to analyze the structure of the Facebook networks of two of the most important Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) in Cadiz: Red Cross Cádiz (RCC) and Cáritas Asidonia Jerez (CAJ)
The interviews were carried out for exploratory purposes to find out how communication is managed on Facebook in the organizations under study
These results show the perspective of the leading communication managers related to RCC and CAJ regarding the following issues: the knowledge before the development of Facebook marketing strategies, the implementation of these strategies, and the monitoring and evaluation of these strategies
Summary
As organizations and individuals become increasingly immersed in a virtual environment, digital social networks (DSNs) have emerged as one of the most widely used communication tools In this regard, the 2021 report by We Are Social and Hootsuite highlighted two critical facts: first, the number of worldwide users of social networks in January 2021 was 4.2 billion, and, second, Facebook is the leading social network, with almost 2.740 million users visiting the site per month, at the beginning of that year [1]. Facebook is still the social network with the most users in the world [3] In addition to this popularity, DSNs offer other advantages, such as the opportunity to network with related people and organizations, to involve a variety of participants in their activities, and to find out what is being said about them on the Internet. These factors make DSNs valuable marketing tools [4,5,6,7,8]
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