Exploring Evidence of Strategic Attention to Social Media in Large Firms

The level of attention paid to social media is heterogeneous across firms. (Larson & Vieregger, 2024). Some firms adopted the use of social media as soon as it hit the scene, while other firms adopted much later, with a handful that never adopted the technology. There is also considerable variation in the amount of social media activity by or about any given firm. This exploratory research is intended to help explain these dramatic differences in corporate social media engagement (CSME) and the strategic attention that is paid to social media across large firms. This research attempts to take an organizational perspective on what has been well-documented as an individual psychological phenomenon (Karahanna et al., 2018), asking the research question, how does a large firm use social media for strategic purposes? An untapped research opportunity exists to integrate an understanding of CSME with a long history of attention-based research (Ocasio, 2018). The attention-based perspective suggests that the strategy and performance of the firm can be understood by careful analysis of the factors and stakeholders to which the executives give their limited attention (e.g., Ocasio, 1997; Ocasio & Joseph, 2005). Social media provides the firm with the opportunity to completely change the scope of attention to message directly all stakeholders (Crilly & Sloan, 2014), while also attending to the needs of those same stakeholders through two-way engagement with posts and content. Utilizing a dataset that quantifies the level of CSME across Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and Instagram of 852 Fortune 1000 companies, we study a strategically selected subset of those companies for qualitative review. We gather evidence about whether top executives are directly involved in CSME, the extent to which the company responds directly to its various stakeholder groups (customers, suppliers, and investors) on social media, whether the firm uses social media to replace more traditional communication options, and the strategic level of such engagement (strategic vs. transactional). The proposed qualitative review is expected to help validate our proposed measures of CSME as strategic mechanisms of attention by the firm and begin to explain the variation in CSME across firms.