Tweeting for change: social media narratives for sustainable service

Purpose

This interdisciplinary study aims to analyze how service organizations communicate sustainable beliefs in their social media narratives and use them to generate brand awareness, customer recognition and ongoing demand for sustainable service.

Design/methodology/approach

A two-phase exploratory analysis of 10,342 tweets from 2019–2020 was conducted by sustainable global corporations to identify best practices for their social media teams operating within a service-based business model. First, the significant themes were identified using an unguided machine learning approach of three types of firms: services, goods and mixed. Next, the full set of tweets with linguistic sentiment analysis was analyzed followed by a deeper view of the services-based organizations based on their strategic focus (business-to-business [B2B] versus mixed).

Findings

The findings indicate that tweets that appear to create the highest customer engagement are characterized as having high levels of analytical language, high clout (i.e. are socially relevant), a positive tone, a high number of words and a high number of words per sentence. On the other hand, having complex language in terms of six-letter words does not seem to associate with customer engagement. The last level of analysis shows that B2B services-based corporations with positive tone and higher word count exhibit higher levels of retweets. Implications include providing rational and informational tweets to increase engagement and highlight societal relevance.

Originality/value

Climate change has negative consequences on human and physical capital, and ecosystems across the globe. This study provides specific recommendations for how services corporations can increase their sustainable communications and actions.

Practical implications

The key implication of our research is that corporations must strategically design social media narratives about climate change as part of their online branding and communications process.