Corporate Social Responsibility on Twitter: A Review of Topics and Digital Communication Strategies’ Success Factors

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly important for companies in recent years. On the one hand, regulatory frameworks require the disclosure of measures for sustainable management. On the other hand, for long-term corporate success, stakeholders must be strategically engaged in the dialog on sustainability aspects. Social media and Twitter in particular offer the potential to foster a meaningful stakeholder dialogue on CSR topics. Twitter’s strategic realignment due to Elon Musk’s acquisition in the fall of 2022, provides an opportunity to capture research results on activities and strategies on the platform systematically, and to synthesize information for future comparative longitudinal studies of changes in usage. We conducted a literature review including 42 papers to contribute to the body of evidence on CSR communication strategies on Twitter across industries and countries, by deriving interdisciplinary suggestions for strategic CSR-related stakeholder management. Results cover relevant CSR topics, prioritized stakeholder groups for CSR communication on Twitter, and successful communication strategies for companies to obtain beneficial results, such as generating social media capital. The results contribute to the strategic planning and implementation of CSR stakeholder management on Twitter, and offer starting points for future studies on social-media mining and CSR communication strategies.