Stakeholder engagement and SDGs: the role of social media in the European context

Purpose – The authors aim to investigate which social media posts’ characteristics result in higher stakeholder engagement in the European context. Design/methodology/approach – The authors apply chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) method to categorize social media posts based on their engagement levels. The authors conduct analysis on the tweets published in 2019 by companies that draw up and publish 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. Findings – The authors find that tweet characteristics, such as content type, industry type and country of a firm, significantly influence stakeholder engagement rate. Practical implications – The findings are useful for practitioners and stakeholders. Firm management should consider the most important Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) concerning their business activities for engaging stakeholders and contributing to sustainable development. Originality/value – The authors consider stakeholder theory and contribute to stakeholder engagement and sustainability debate. For this purpose, the authors focus on firms’ communication of SDGs through social media. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which considers the SDGs’ communication to determine the most significant SDGs resulting in higher stakeholder engagement.