Corporate Social Responsibility and social media

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been developed both theoretically, while an increase of attention in business practice has been signaled as well. At the same time, researchers urge companies to integrate CSR in their entire business conduct and listen to their consumers. To do so, companies should communicate their CSR efforts and work together with consumers by using social media. This article examines how companies in the retail sector actually use social media platforms such as Facebook to communicate their CSR efforts and how consumers react to this. By conducting a quantitative content analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 retail companies in the Netherlands, this article shows that the majority of the examined retail companies communicate at least some of their CSR efforts through social media. However, they devote only small percentages of their content to it. Generally, consumers interact with these posts in the same way as with other posts, and in some cases are less negative. Although consumers remain critical and are never really satisfied with the CSR efforts of companies, social media do seem to be adequate for reaching the audience and interacting with consumers. However, companies will have to prepare for (responding to) criticisms and many companies have yet to start to communicate their CSR efforts. If they do, their social media use could contribute to implementing CSR.