The use of social media for engaging stakeholders in sustainability reporting

In this study we aim to explore the strengths and weaknesses of social media as an instrument of stakeholder engagement and dialogic accounting in sustainability reporting in order to identify, interact, and engage with the largest possible number of organization stakeholders. We want to study the whether and how social media play a role in defining the content of sustainability reports, so contributing to the respect of materiality and relevance principles of information disclosed. We conducted an empirical survey on a sample of 332 worldwide sustainability reports of the year 2013 written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Dutch and drawn up according to the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines version 3.1 and version 4.0 issued by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and on the Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages of the corporations who declared in the report the use of these social media for engaging stakeholders. The results of our study find that social media can effectively contribute, under specific conditions and through the restraining of some typical limitations of the Internet, to building and reinforcing an authentic stakeholder engagement system.