CSR communication strategy of Iberdrola on Facebook and Twitter: A corpus-based content and linguistic analysis
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Abstract
In our increasingly digitalized civilization where sharing information and interacting about it is ever more made available to the general public, research into corporate communication practices of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) content on social media is desperately needed. This study makes a contribution to fill this research gap by performing a corpus-based content and multimodal linguistic analysis of the way in which an IBEX 35 energy company, Iberdrola, communicates about its CSR policy on social media. The corpus consists of 438 posts on Twitter and 126 posts on Facebook.
The results allow to draw the following conclusions: 1) Iberdrola’s information strategy varies from social media channel, where on Twitter the focus is through the environment, sustainability, social investment, stakeholders and arts, and on Facebook the focus is directed at stakeholders, thus motivating them to engage with CSR-related information; 2) there is certainly an interactive strategy, with many elements that characterize digital discourse, such as structures that elicit (positive) emotions, informal language use (like emojis and use of 1st and 2nd person) and other multimodal elements like hashtags and tags, which are all efforts at increasing brand trust, engagement, and admiration; 3) there are some underlying patterns within the informative and the interactive strategy, being that the overall way in which Iberdrola wants to communicate its CSR information is through informal and (positive) emotional language, with an exception of negative emotional language when discussing environmental themes, most probably to avoid accusations of greenwashing.
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