“Chief engagement officers?” A comparative study between U.S. corporate and nonprofit executive Leaders' social media communication strategies

Abstract

Organizational leaders are increasingly expected to be visible and communicative on social media with organizations' public. Drawing theory and literature from dialogic communication and leadership communication, this study analyzed and compared how corporate and nonprofit executive leaders capitalized on various dialogic principles and social presence strategies for engagement purposes. We content-analyzed Twitter posts from leaders in corporate and nonprofit sectors.Findings revealed notable differences in how corporate and nonprofit executives communicated with publics on Twitter. While leaders from both sectors posted information valuable to their stakeholders and used affective strategies to project a personable image and nurture relationships, nonprofit leaders focused on social influence, whereas corporate executives emphasized information dissemination. This study also showed mixed findings regarding the relationships between leaders' communication strategies and publics' social media engagement.

CEO social: análisis de la presencia y actividad en redes sociales de los directores ejecutivos de empresas

“…Los CEO emiten sus primeros balbuceos dialógicos. Finalmente, la tercera ola representa la era del CEO social, momento en el que los directores explotan los principios dialógicos de participación en las redes sociales (Yue et al, 2023). Esta aparición de los ejecutivos en espacios digitales es definida como presencia social (Men et al, 2018;Tsai y Men, 2017).…”

“…Por lo tanto, estar presentes sin ser proactivos deprecia la reputación de los CEO (Alghawi et al, 2014;Vidgen et al, 2013). Una de las formas de capitalizar su presencia social activa es a través del buen uso de los principios dialógicos y de estrategias con fines participativos (Yue et al, 2023).…”

Engagement of nonprofit organizations' followers on Instagram

“…Engagement is considered as the public's interaction with an organization in the context of social media (Taylor & Kent, 2014), which can take different forms such as “likes,” “comments,” and “shares” (or retweets). Research on variables that are associated with engagement in NPOs' social media has begun focusing primarily on Facebook (Maxwell & Carboni, 2016; Saxton & Waters, 2014) and, to a minor extent, Twitter (Guo & Saxton, 2018; Smith, 2018; Yue et al, 2023). Following previous literature, we identify three different types of variables that are not usually studied together: organizational characteristics (e.g., size, age, and origin of funds), social media use (e.g., number of followers, social media activity, and presence on multiple social media platforms), and post content (e.g., type of post content, effect of visual posts containing photos or videos, and use of interactive tools).…”