The Role of Social Media for Stakeholder Targeting

Social media has already become a must-have tool for organizational communication. An organization has to deal with several different stakeholder groups, which can be accomplished with the help of social media. However, targeted communication with such a diverse range of stakeholders remains a challenging task. Defining stakeholders as 'all people having a stake in an organization' further increases the variety of potential communication targets. Whereas the majority of social media research typically focuses upon customers as the most important stakeholders, we broaden this idea based on existing stakeholder considerations. This means that customers are considered as one group of stakeholders, with business partners, employees or NGOs (non-governmental organizations) being amongst the others. Each group has very different needs and expects certain content in their communications. Protecting a company from the negative effects of communication, through appropriate stakeholder targeting, including choice of information as well as social media platform selection, is crucial. Clearly, non-intentional communications can negatively impact an organization in terms of resources or damage to their image. Organizations therefore must design targeted communications, using their organizational resources appropriately. Social media platforms, as a set of cost-efficient and effective tools in direct communication, are considered an important means for stakeholder targeting. Therefore, we investigated which social media tools are primarily used in stakeholder communications, and which stakeholders are typically focused. Based on literature review and qualitative and quantitative content analysis, this paper develops insights into the platforms commonly used and the stakeholders commonly addressed. Results suggest that social networking sites are the dominant form of communication, and customers are the stakeholder group most targeted. However, a large number of publications did not investigate specific stakeholders or social media platforms. Hence, we conclude that stakeholder communication should be targeted more than is currently the case. Our research underlines the relevance of the field and encourages organizational strategy endeavours in order to exploit the benefits of social media for targeted stakeholder communication.