In light of the increased demand for greater accountability and legitimacy, new disclosure mechanisms based on non-financial transparency have emerged. Universities cannot be left behind with respect to these social demands. In addition, continuous competition in excellence is driving higher education organizations to exhibit a greater visibility of their results, necessarily incorporating more non-financial aspects to boost stakeholder engagement. The novelty of this work lies in the analysis of the real state of non-financial vs. financial information in both public and private universities and in the exploration of their influence on stakeholder online engagement. To this end, a content analysis of the universities’ web pages and Facebook profiles was conducted, and a multivariable linear regression analysis was performed. The main results show that private and larger universities that lead Webometrics for Google Scholar Citations, and those that have gradually been adopting financial reporting, are the most interested in implementing Facebook as a two-way communication strategy. It seems that stakeholders react more to financial transparency and, therefore, universities still prefer financial disclosure to improve accountability.

Stakeholders are increasingly concerned about climate change and companies’ commitment to anticipate future carbon-related risks, and grant or withdraw support depending on their perceptions of firms’ carbon performance. The aim of this research is to analyse which carbon-related factors influence stakeholders with regards to the legitimacy-granting process. The sample in this study includes 146 firms from North America and Europe committed to carbon mitigation, whose legitimacy is measured via social media interactions. Findings show that setting a corporate carbon policy and disclosing an internal price of carbon are positively linked to legitimacy, while other factors are negatively or not related to legitimacy. This study makes theoretical contributions, proposing a metric based on social media stakeholder engagement to measure corporate legitimacy, as well as practical implications, revealing which carbon information shapes stakeholders’ perception of firms’ climate performance, and opening new possibilities for future research.

Health organizations, continuously exposed to public scrutiny due to the social relevance of the services provided, have adopted social media to disseminate information about health but also about themselves, and thus, reducing uncertainty and improving communication. In this context, users’ participation in social media has become one of the main indicators of their effectiveness, highlighting the importance of analyzing which factors enhance online engagement. This research extends the number of variables identified in prior studies and analyzes 19,817 Facebook posts from 126 health organizations. Using multivariate linear regression, explanatory results show that economic and organizational attributes, and factors related to the social media posts, both contribute significantly to explain the engagement reached in social media by those organizations. According to our findings, health organizations are not taking enough advantage of social media to engage with their current and potential users. The dissemination of relevant information using visually attractive formats could help draw the attention of consumers, both to reach a higher commitment with the organization and to create value for society.

The number of people worldwide without access to safe drinking water or adequate sanitation is an unresolved and growing concern, with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) playing an important role in mitigating the effects of water shortage. These organizations utilize the communication mechanisms at their disposal, such as social media, to help spread their social message and to achieve the commitment of society to their cause. In this context and based on dialogic and the resource dependence theory framework, the main aim of this research is to analyze how organizational structure, resource allocation and communication policies of NGOs focused on water management influence the online commitment of their stakeholders. Exploratory results show that these NGOs are not taking enough advantage of social media to engage with their potential donors and volunteers because of the remarkable difference between the management of Facebook posts and users’ behavior. Using multivariate lineal regression, our findings show that certain structural (namely, size, reputation and board size), economic (fundraising expenses) and social media (number of Facebook fans) characteristics positively influence stakeholder engagement, while administrative spending and a broad presence in many social networks straitens the ability of these type of NGOs to attract and retain stakeholders’ commitment through social media.

Social media, in the form of online reviews (ORs), has become an essential element for consumers in the restaurant industry, providing reliable and unbiased information based on the dining experiences of other consumers. Social media is not only a crucial phenomenon for the strategy of restaurants, but also for their corporations. However, previous literature has focused on the analysis at the establishment level, rather than at the corporate level, especially when referring to financial performance. The present study tries to verify if social media also affects corporate financial performance. For this, the impact of ORs on advanced measures of financial performance was examined at the corporate level on a sample of 800 restaurants selected from the total population of active restaurants in Europe in 2018. The investigation applied both regression analysis and nonparametric techniques. They demonstrate a positive effect of ORs on financial performance, and a heterogeneous relationship between both variables across the European countries. Restaurants are becoming aware of the implications of this phenomenon since it could provide strategies for sustainable economic development.