A set of metrics to assess stakeholder engagement and social legitimacy on a corporate Facebook page
| Pages | 787-803 |
| Date | 23 September 2013 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2012-0054 |
| Published date | 23 September 2013 |
| Author | Enrique Bonsón,Melinda Ratkai |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
A set of metrics to assess
stakeholder engagement and
social legitimacy on a corporate
Facebook page
Enrique Bonso
´n and Melinda Ratkai
Faculty of Business Sciences, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – This study aims to propose a set of metrics in order to assess reactivity, dialogic
communication and stakeholder engagement (popularity, commitment and virality): stakeholders’
mood and social legitimacy on corporate Facebook pages. These metrics can offer a better
understanding and measurability of this social media/social networ k/online communication
management tool.
Design/methodology/approach – Three theories (dialogic, stakeholders and legitimacy) were
considered in the development of these metrics. Empirical evidence was collected from a sample of 314
European companies. Then ten active companies were used to validate the proposed metrics on
Facebook.
Findings – The constructed set of metrics was found to be valid and efficiently usable according to
the principles of the applied theories. Moreover all the proposed metrics could be adapted for such sites
as Google þ.
Research limitations/implications – Limitations can only be identified within the validation
process as the metrics were only applied to ten representative companies from the Eurozone.
Practical implications – The proposed metrics will help users, marketing/PR/communication
professionals and company managers to measure their and their competitors’ popularity, commitment,
virality (metrics which reflect stakeholder engagement), and the mood of stakeholders, and use content
analysis in order to measure social legitimacy via CSR information disclosure on Facebook. Thus the
online reputation of a company can be practically measured.
Originality/value – This paper is the first proposing metrics to assess stakeholder engagement and
social legitimacy on a corporate Facebook page that can be used in both academic and professional
circles to a gain a better understanding of corporate online communication via Facebook.
Keywords Corporate Facebookand Google þmetrics, Stakeholder engagement,Corporate dialogue,
Online reputation,Voluntary disclosure, Sociallegitimacy
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Recent changes in the business environment have prompted scholars to pay particular
attention to social networking sites (SNS) as a new medium of business
communication. In the growing body of literature on SNS, several papers have
focused on Facebook in particular (Mayer and Puller, 2008; Lewis et al., 2008; Hughe s
et al., 2012). Facebook and most SNS offer a strong platform for creating empirical
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
This study has been carried out with the financial support of the Spanish National R&D Plan
through research project ECO2011-28267 (ECON-FEDER).
A set of metrics
787
Received 23 March 2012
First revision accepted
3 August 2012
Online Information Review
Vol. 37 No. 5, 2013
pp. 787-803
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-03-2012-0054
studies because of their public features, although their measurement is not easy. The
advent of the internet not only reorganised the way in which companies collect
information, but also redefined stakeholders’ expectations. A study of governments
showed that Web 2.0 applications are creating new features of innovation and
improved transparency (Meijer and Thaens, 2010) and in some sense their stakeholders
are recognised as partners and co-creators, not just consumers (Chua et al., 2012).
Companies use social media for communication purposes with stakeholders. The
field of marketing and PR is generally well studied within the topic of communication,
for exmaple how firms support their brands (Michaelidou et al., 2011; E-Marketer, 2010;
Breslauer and Smith, 2009). The goal is to identify Facebook metrics to help the
measurement of this online SNS channel for professionals focusing on stakeholders,
corporate social responsibility and social legitimacy. This study provides insights into
some specifically corporate Facebook practices and offers new measurement metrics of
popularity, commitment, and virality, stakeholders’ mood and content analysis. Thus
it also examines the online reputation of a firm. The aim was to develop a new
dimension of measurements from which new findings and implications can be drawn.
They not only can be used by practitioners, but can also help scholars identify how to
use Facebook as a tool for online reputation management.
For these reasons the paper seeks to address the following research questions based
on three theories as explained in the corporate Facebook metrics section:
RQ1. How can reactivity and dialogic communication be measured on corporate
Facebook?
RQ2. How can stakeholder engagement be measured?
RQ3. How can stakeholders’ mood be measured on corporate Facebook?
RQ4. How can social legitimacy be measured on corporate Facebook?
Previous research
Social networking is part of Web 2.0, which means the user is no longer just a
consumer of the content, but also actively participates in creating and shaping it. This
new stage of the internet opened the way to communicate, collaborate and share
content easily and fast online, basically with anyone. Some relevant studies deal with
Web 2.0 (Chua et al., 2012) and the internet (Calero et al., 2005; Hariri, 2010) in general or
focus on a particular issue such as the measurement of URLs for different purposes,
such as advertisements (Saikat and Bin Cheng, 2010) and information propagation
(Zheng et al., 2010; Esrock and Leichty, 1998).
Granovetter (1973) pioneered the direction of social network research as a scholarly
discipline. The growth of social network analysis as an academic field has coincided with
the popularity of social network sites (web-based services such as Facebook) that allow
individuals to have their own profile, have a list of other users, and view and traverse their
list of connections (Boyd and Ellison, 2008). Researchers have long recognised the
potential of online communication technologies for improving network research (Rogers,
1987; Watts, 2007). Works related to social network analysis offer models measured by
social graphs (Sala et al., 2010) or large scale data clustering (Becker et al., 2010).
Some others report on the usage of SNS, virtual communities or social networking in
general (Hsiao, 2011; Royo-Vela and Casamassima, 2010) or focus on a special channel
OIR
37,5
788
To continue reading
Request your trial