Thematic dis/connection of Ibex35 companies to generate dialogue with their stakeholders via Twitter during the pandemic

Abstract

Studies of corporate communication and intangible management are especially interested in knowing how to establish a proper dialogue with stakeholders to integrate their concerns into internal management and to be able to have greater corporate legitimacy. The lockdown and the following months of the pandemic allow to know if the firms have succeeded in applying the principles of corporate communication and if there have been new strategies that should be known in future crises. This research wants to know what topics and contents have been communicated by the companies to promote dialogue and to detect if their strategies have influenced their audiences by promoting engagement. To this end, the behavior on Twitter of the 27 IBEX35 companies with verified corporate accounts has been analyzed using statistical methods. The results show that companies have communicated more and have generated more engagement than before the pandemic. It is also observed that they have increased their efforts to publish specific content for each stakeholder group. Finally, the results indicate that the topics most communicated were not the ones that generated the most engagement, which shows that despite the interest in dialoguing with stakeholders, companies are not able to communicate what is of real interest to their audiences. The study presents practical implications and discussions with the previous literature on online communication management and stakeholder dialogue.