Social media engagement of stakeholders in the oil and gas sector: Social presence, triple bottom line and source credibility theory

Abstract

Enabled by Web 2.0 technology, social media has revolutionised the way organisations communicate with their audiences by allowing a two-way interaction between companies and their stakeholders. The oil and gas industry, whose businesses are notorious for their environmental and social impacts, utilises social media to engage its stakeholders and improve branding. However, social media posts have different levels of engagement. This paper aims to identify and evaluate, through hierarchical regression modelling, the characteristics of social media posts that generate higher stakeholder engagement in the oil and gas industry. Three diverse research paradigms centring on Social Presence Theory, the Triple Bottom Line framework and Source Credibility Theory were integrated in an attempt to provide logical explanations for stakeholder engagement. The study's findings demonstrate that the existence of hashtags, reposts, call-to-action, emojis, exclamation marks or question marks, the tangibility of resources, and well as social and environmental content all significantly influence stakeholder engagement rate. The results also show that there are significant positive interactions between hashtag usage as well as commercial and environmental content type when facilitating engagement. Overall, this study offers novel insights into the factors behind stakeholder engagement and has important implications for the future application of social media practices for oil and gas companies.