Abstract
PurposeCorporate social responsibility (CSR) communication is becoming increasingly important for brands and companies. Social media such as Twitter may be platforms particularly suited to this topic, given their ability to foster dialogue and content diffusion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors driving the effectiveness of CSR communication on Twitter, with a focus on the communication strategies and elements of storytelling.Design/methodology/approachUsing a sample of 281,291 tweets from top global companies in the food sector, automated content analysis (including supervised machine learning) was used to investigate the influence of CSR communication, emotion, and aspirational talk on the likelihood that Twitter users will retweet and like tweets from the companies.FindingsThe findings highlight the importance of aspirational talk and engaging users in CSR messages. Furthermore, the study revealed that the companies and brands on Twitter that tweeted more frequently about CSR were associated with higher overall levels of content diffusion and endorsement.Originality/valueThis study provides important insights into key aspects of communicating about CSR issues on social networking sites such as Twitter and makes several practical recommendations for companies.
Highlights
The importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication continues to grow within corporate communication research and practice (Pollach et al, 2012)
The growing need for companies to communicate about their CSR efforts has raised questions about the effectiveness and implementation of CSR communication strategies (Pollach et al, 2012)
Relying on the large sample of 281,291 tweets from brands and companies operating in the food sector, this study provides several important insights into key aspects of CSR communication on Twitter as outlined in the theoretical and practical implications below
Summary
The importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication continues to grow within corporate communication research and practice (Pollach et al, 2012). Consumers and stakeholders have increasingly higher expectations of brands and companies, which must address ethical issues if they want to achieve a competitive advantage (Du et al, 2010). The relevance of communicating CSR is especially critical given that it can help build a more positive reputation and product perceptions Chernev and Blair, 2015), achieve competitive success (Porter and Kramer, 2006), and has become an important expectation for stakeholders (Podnar and Golob, 2007). Lee and Shin, 2010; Wigley, 2008) and influence the stakeholder evaluations of an organization, which, in turn, improve the organization’s image and reputation in the long term (Du et al, 2010). The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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