Do Social Media Engage Stakeholders Through SDGs Communication? Some Preliminary Results from a Cross-country Analysis

We aim at investigating which social media posts’ characteristics could better affect stakeholder engagement with respect to UN SDGs in the European context. We apply Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) method to categorize social media posts based on their engagement levels. We considered the Twitter, a well-known social media platform, and collected all the tweets published in 2019 by companies that issued a sustainability report on Global Reporting (www.globalreporting.org). The final sample is based on 3,045 tweets from 173 firms of different industries and countries. We find that tweets characteristics such as content type (communication of SDGs), industry type and country of a firm significantly influence stakeholder engagement rate. This paper contributes to provide new insights about the impact of the communication of SDGs by the firms through social media on stakeholder engagement. The results of this study can be generalized to all European countries as well as to other continents. Findings suggest that firms need to pay more attention to focus on most important group of SDGs in order to achieve a sustainable world. Keywords: Stakeholder Engagement, SDGs, Social Media, CHAID, European Firms.