Organizations’ Dialogic Social Media Use and Stakeholder Engagement: Stakeholder Targeting and Message Framing

Abstract

Guided by the dialogic communication framework, stakeholder theory, and research on implicit framing, this study examines how stakeholder engagement reflects organizations’ dialogic social media use in the form of stakeholder targeting and message framing. Analysis of survey data from 156 humanitarian organizations and semantic network analysis of their messages on Facebook and Twitter reveal that organizations with higher levels of dialogic social media use target relatively distinctive stakeholders. More dialogic organizations explore more diverse concepts in their posts, but the themes of discussion on Twitter and Facebook both diverge and converge regardless of levels of dialogic social media use. Moreover, the semantic differences among the organizations in the low- and high-dialogic groups are more salient on Twitter than on Facebook. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are drawn from the findings.