Examining the Communication Shared on X-Platform by Member Companies of a Social Impact Forética Cluster
Article Sidebar
833)How to Cite
398
Abstract
This paper aims to examine how companies in a cluster communicate their activities on X-platform (formerly Twitter). Three main tasks were considered in this study: 1) an analysis of Tweet (formerly tweet) level messages according to the subject matter posted; 2) an analysis of the messages at the tweet level in terms of the communication design; 3) an analysis of the affective connotation of the language used in each message. We examined a sample of tweets posted for one year by member companies of a Social Impact cluster. The results indicate that the cluster companies use X-platform (formerly Twitter) to communicate their corporate activities with a weekly frequency that ranges from 5 to 182 posts. The analysis of the messages shows that i) there is a predominance of posts referring to corporate products and services as opposed to corporate social responsibility; ii) companies post to create community; and, iii) graphic and audio-visual resources within the content of the posts are predominant. The results have both practical and academic implications, which can be used to develop strategies for companies to take advantage of the social networking site's capabilities or tools and develop plans for building strong relationships with their audience.
References
Ajayi, O. A., & Mmutle, T. (2021). Corporate reputation through strategic communication of corporate social responsibility. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 26(5), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-02-2020-0047
Bonsón, E., Bednarova, M., & Escobar-Rodríguez, T. (2014). Corporate YouTube practices of Eurozone companies. Online Information Review, 38(4), 484-501. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-07-2013-0181
Brown, T. J., & Dacin, P. A. (1997). The Company and the Product: Corporate Associations and Consumer Product Responses. Journal of Marketing, 61(1), 68. https://doi.org/10.2307/1252190
Brucks, M. S., & Levav, J. (2022). Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. Nature, 605(7908), 108-112. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04643-y
Carroll, A. B. (1991). The Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibiiity: Toward the Moral Management of Organizational Stakeholders. Business Horizons, 34, 39-48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0312896211432941
Cvijikj, I. P., & Michahelles, F. (2013). Online engagement factors on Facebook brand pages. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 3(4), 843-861. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-013-0098-8
Dacin, P. A., & Brown, T. J. (2002). Corporate Identity and Corporate Associations: A Framework for Future Research. Corporate Reputation Review, 5(2-3), 254-263. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.crr.1540178
de Vries, L., Gensler, S., & Leeflang, P. S. H. (2012). Popularity of Brand Posts on Brand Fan Pages: An Investigation of the Effects of Social Media Marketing. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26(2), 83-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2012.01.003
Dijkmans, C., Kerkhof, P., Buyukcan-Tetik, A., & Beukeboom, C. J. (2015). Online Conversation and Corporate Reputation: A Two-Wave Longitudinal Study on the Effects of Exposure to the Social Media Activities of a Highly Interactive Company. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20(6), 632-648. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12132
Dutot, V., Lacalle Galvez, E., & Versailles, D. W. (2016). CSR communications strategies through social media and influence on e-reputation. Management Decision, 54(2), 363-389. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-01-2015-0015
Elbagir, S., & Yang, J. (2020). Sentiment Analysis on Twitter with Python's Natural Language Toolkit and VADER Sentiment Analyzer. IAENG Transactions on Engineering Sciences, 63-80. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789811215094_0005
Eriksson, M. (2018). Lessons for Crisis Communication on Social Media: A Systematic Review of What Research Tells the Practice. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 12(5), 526-551. https://doi.org/10.1080/1553118X.2018.1510405
Etter, M. (2014). Broadcasting, reacting, engaging - three strategies for CSR communication in Twitter. Journal of Communication Management, 18(4), 322-342. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCOM-01-2013-0007
Forética. (2023). Anual Report. https://foretica.org/en/2024/06/memoria-foretica-2023/
Forética. (2024). Social Impact Cluster. Social Impact Cluster- Participating Companies. Available at: https://foretica.org/proyectos-esg/social/cluster-de-impacto-social/
Hoffman, D. L., & Novak, T. P. (2012). Toward a Deeper Understanding of Social Media. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26(2), 69-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2012.03.001
Holtzhausen, D., Fullerton, J. A., Lewis, B. K., & Shipka, D. (2021). Introduction to the Theory of Strategic Communication. In Taylor & Francis (Ed.), Principles of Strategic Communication (1st ed., pp. 1-27). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002048-1
Hutto, C., & Gilbert, E. (2014). VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-Based Model for Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 8(1), 216-225. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14550
Illia, L., & Balmer, J. M. T. (2012). Corporate communication and corporate marketing. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 17(4), 415-433. https://doi.org/10.1108/13563281211274121
Inoue, Y., & Kent, A. (2014). A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Effects of Corporate Social Marketing on Consumer Behavior. Journal of Business Ethics, 121(4), 621-633. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1742-y
Jansen, B. J., Zhang, M., Sobel, K., & Chowdury, A. (2009). Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(11), 2169-2188. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21149
Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007). Why we twitter. Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis, 56-65. https://doi.org/10.1145/1348549.1348556
Ji, Y. G., Chen, Z. F., Tao, W., & Cathy Li, Z. (2019). Functional and emotional traits of corporate social media message strategies: Behavioral insights from S&P 500 Facebook data. Public Relations Review, 45(1), 88-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2018.12.001
Kim, S. S. Y., Kim, S. S. Y., & Sung, K. H. (2014). Fortune 100 companies' Facebook strategies: Corporate ability versus social responsibility. Journal of Communication Management, 18(4), 343-362. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCOM-01-2012-0006
Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data. Biometrics, 33(1), 159. https://doi.org/10.2307/2529310
Lee, C., & Hallak, R. (2020). Investigating the effects of offline and online social capital on tourism SME performance: A mixed-methods study of New Zealand entrepreneurs. Tourism Management, 80, 104128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2020.104128
Lei, S. S. I., Pratt, S., & Wang, D. (2017). Factors influencing customer engagement with branded content in the social network sites of integrated resorts. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 22(3), 316-328. https://doi.org/10.1080/10941665.2016.1250792
Liu, B. (2011). Web Data Mining. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19460-3
Lovejoy, K., & Saxton, G. D. (2012). Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17(3), 337-353. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01576.x
Luarn, P., Lin, Y.-F., & Chiu, Y.-P. (2015). Influence of Facebook brand-page posts on online engagement. Online Information Review. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-01-2015-0029
Menon, R. G. V., Sigurdsson, V., Larsen, N. M., Fagerstrøm, A., Sørensen, H., Marteinsdottir, H. G., & Foxall, G. R. (2019). How to grow brand post engagement on Facebook and Twitter for airlines? An empirical investigation of design and content factors. Journal of Air Transport Management, 79, 101678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2019.05.002
Mittal, R., Ahmed, W., Mittal, A., & Aggarwal, I. (2021). Twitter users' coping behaviors during the COVID-19 lockdown: an analysis of tweets using mixed methods. Information Discovery and Delivery, 49(3), 193-202. https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-08-2020-0102
Naaman, M., Boase, J., & Lai, C.-H. (2010). Is it really about me?: message content in social awareness streams. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 189-192. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718953
Nair, A. J., G, V., & Vinayak, A. (2021). Comparative study of Twitter Sentiment On COVID - 19 Tweets. 2021 5th International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC), 1773-1778. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCMC51019.2021.9418320
Peters, K., Chen, Y., Kaplan, A. M., Ognibeni, B., & Pauwels, K. (2013). Social media metrics - A framework and guidelines for managing social media. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 27(4), 281-298. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2013.09.007
Rutz, O. J., & Bucklin, R. E. (2011). From Generic to Branded: A Model of Spillover in Paid Search Advertising. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(1), 87-102. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.48.1.87
Saxton, G. D., & Waters, R. D. (2014). What do Stakeholders Like on Facebook? Examining Public Reactions to Nonprofit Organizations' Informational, Promotional, and Community-Building Messages. Journal of Public Relations Research, 26(3), 280-299. https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2014.908721
Sterbenk, Y., Champlin, S., Windels, K., & Shelton, S. (2022). Is Femvertising the New Greenwashing? Examining Corporate Commitment to Gender Equality. Journal of Business Ethics, 177(3), 491-505. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04755-x
Sung, H., Kim, J., & Choi, H. (2021). Effects of consumer-cause fit and consumer-product fit of cause‐related marketing on product purchase intention. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 20(3), 791-802. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.1909
Swani, K., & Milne, G. R. (2017). Evaluating Facebook brand content popularity for service versus goods offerings. Journal of Business Research, 79, 123-133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.06.003
Swani, K., Milne, G. R., Brown, B. P., Assaf, A. G., & Donthu, N. (2017). What messages to post? Evaluating the popularity of social media communications in business versus consumer markets. Industrial Marketing Management, 62, 77-87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2016.07.006
Valentine, S., & Fleischman, G. (2007). Ethics Programs, Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility and Job Satisfaction. Journal of Business Ethics, 77(2), 159-172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2016.07.006
Westerman, D., Spence, P. R., & Van Der Heide, B. (2014). Social Media as Information Source: Recency of Updates and Credibility of Information. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(2), 171-183. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12041
Yuan, S. (2019). Comparative analysis of Chinese and Japanese corporate communication on Facebook and Twitter. Chinese Journal of Communication, 12(2), 224-243. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2018.1528292
Zeler, I., & Capriotti, P. (2018). Gestión interactiva de la comunicación de la RSE de las empresas de Argentina en Facebook. Retos, 8(16), 7-18. https://doi.org/10.17163/ret.n16.2018.01
Zeler, I., Oliveira, A., & Triano Morales, R. (2022). Responsabilidad Social Corporativa y crisis sanitaria de la Covid-19: la comunicación de las empresas energéticas españolas en Twitter Corporate. Revista de Comunicación, 21(1), 451-468. https://doi.org/10.26441/RC21.1-2022-A23
Zhou, Z., Zhou, X., Chen, Y., & Qi, H. (2024). Evolution of online public opinions on major accidents: Implications for post-accident response based on social media network. Expert Systems with Applications, 235, 121307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121307
Issue
Section
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Rights transfer
By submitting the article for evaluation and subsequent publication in Communication & Society, the AUTHOR grants exclusive economic and/or exploitation rights: reproduction, distribution, public communication, transformation/translation/creation of derivative works, and commercialisation to the University of Navarra through its Publications Service, for the maximum legal period in force -the author's lifetime and seventy years after his or her death or declaration of death-, in any country, and in any of the current and future publishing modalities, both in print and electronic versions.
In the event that the article is not accepted for publication, this transfer of rights lapses with the communication of the refusal to the AUTHOR.
The AUTHOR affirms that the article is unpublished, that it has not been sent simultaneously to another publication medium and that the rights have not been transferred exclusively previously. He is responsible to the University of Navarra through its Publications Service for the authorship and originality of his work, as well as for all pecuniary charges that may arise for the University of Navarra through its Publications Service, in favor of third parties due to actions, claims or conflicts arising from the breach of obligations by the AUTHOR.
Dissemination Policy
The authors agree to the Publisher Policy, published at Open policy finder - Jisc, whereby the editor allows the author to exclusively disseminate the final editorial version through the institutional repository, once the embargo period (1 year) of the journal has expired. Dissemination of the submitted version (preprint) or the version evaluated prior to the editorial version (postprint) is not allowed. The objective of this policy is to avoid the loss of citations that are received from the data of versions different from those of the final and definitive version, which is published and indexed in the databases. If the citation received contains any minimal difference with the indexed data, it will be registered as a reference instead of being considered as a computable citation, which could be detrimental to the journal and the author. Therefore, it is important to follow this policy and share only the final version of the article.