Strategic Communication and Engagement on LinkedIn Pages of Publicly Traded Companies in Romania

Abstract

Social media has become increasingly significant in corporate communication strategies as dialogue with stakeholders acquires more importance. Dialogue is the cornerstone of public engagement in strategic communication, and engagement is evaluated through behavioral outcomes: “like”, “share”, “comment”. This study aims to investigate the message strategies on corporate LinkedIn pages of the companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange and to determine the connections between these strategies and engagement behaviors. The research was conducted on a corpus of LinkedIn posts (N = 226), published by four publicly traded companies. The study appeals to mixed methods: the qualitative analysis of the message strategies and the statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results indicated that LinkedIn emphasizes transformational message strategies. The message strategy type determines the association between like and share behaviors or like and comment to a substantial extent and, to a lower degree, the intertwining between share and comment.