Intellectual capital disclosure on Twitter – empirical evidence from the world’s largest companies

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to examine intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) on Twitter by 60 of the world’s largest companies and explains the main themes communicated to stakeholders. The second objective is to determine which topics provoke most stakeholders’ reactions. Design/methodology/approach The authors perform content analysis on more than 42,000 tweets to examine ICD practices along with the reactions of stakeholders in the form of retweets and “favorites” toward the information disclosed. Findings Intellectual capital (IC) is an important theme in corporate disclosure practices, as more than one-third of the published tweets refer to IC. The world’s largest companies focus on relational capital information, followed by human and structural capital. The main IC themes disclosed were management philosophy, corporate reputation and business partnering. Tweets related to IC are of greater interest to stakeholders than other tweets and provoke more reactions. There is no complete consistency between the topics most intensively disclosed by companies and those that elicit the most vivid responses from the addressees. Practical implications This study offers an understanding of the world’s largest companies’ practices that refer to ICD via social media and has implications for organizations in the creation and use of communication channels when developing a dialogue with stakeholders on topics regarding IC that may lead to better management of IC performance. Originality/value This paper is a response to the call for studies on ICD via social media, which is strongly highlighted in the recent literature concerning future research on IC and until now was almost absent in the field of business units. This research provides in-depth insights into the use of Twitter to disclose IC elements and indicates which fields and topics of this disclosure provoke stakeholders’ reactions, which is a novelty in ICD studies.

Does the Level of Intellectual Capital Affect Meeting the Information Needs of Social Media Users in the Field of Sustainability? The Case of the World’s Largest Energy Industry Companies

“…Generally, smaller companies with limited resources tend to use Twitter less and, if so, mainly for one-way communication. We also decided to exclude Chinese companies from our research since studies suggest Chinese companies barely use English profiles on Twitter for corporate purposes (Bryl 2021). The main features of our sample are presented in the table below.…”

“…Additionally, in today's world, the communication of companies with their stakeholders has changed significantly. The rapid transformation in technologies and forces of mass communication, together with digitization, provide challenges and opportunities for companies concerning information disclosure and dialogue with stakeholders (Bryl, et al, 2021). Evolutions in technology and the way society communicates are shifting reporting practices from traditional media to online channels, such as websites, Facebook, and Twitter (Lombardi & Dumay 2017).…”

Sustainability Disclosure in Social Media – Substitutionary or Complementary to Traditional Reporting?

“…To collect data, a dedicated R script (Rtweet) was used that employed the official Twitter API to download tweets from corporate English profiles for the entire year 2021 (20,247) (Table 1). To determine the sustainability of content in tweets, a content analysis based on the keyword counts method was employed, followed by the study by Bryl et. al (2022b).…”

Social media to disseminate circular economy information. An empirical analysis on Twitter

“…In recent years, the advent of digitalization has provided new digital platforms for the dissemination of CE information (Esposito, Sica, et al, 2023). In particular, it has introduced the use of social media (Dumay, 2016) which have radically changed the disclosure landscape (Bryl et al, 2022). From a corporate disclosure perspective, social media facilitate firm-directed, one-to-many communications that bypass traditional media and allow intended messages to be conveyed to a large network of stakeholders (Lee et al, 2013).…”