The Concept of Sustainability on Social Media: A Social Listening Approach

Abstract

The concept of sustainability has gone far beyond the issues of the sustainable management of natural and environmental resources. Nowadays, sustainability is part of the social sciences in a different way. The aim of this research was dual. Firstly, we analyzed the different contexts and areas of knowledge where this concept is used in society by using social listening on Twitter, one of the most popular social networks today. The sentiments of these conversations were rated to assess whether the feelings and perceptions of these conversations on the social network were positive or negative regarding the use of the concept. Also, we tested if these perceptions about the topic were attuned to other more formal fields, such as scientific research, or strategies followed nationally or internationally by agencies and organizations related to sustainability. The method used on this first part of the research consisted of an analysis of 15,000 tweets collected from Twitter using natural language processing (NLP) for clustering the main areas of knowledge of topics where the concept of sustainability was used, and the sentiment of these conversations on the social network. Secondly, we mapped the social network of users who generated or spread content regarding sustainability on Twitter within the period of observation. Social network analysis (SNA) focuses on the taxonomy of the network and its dynamics and identifies the most relevant players in terms of generation of conversation and also their referrers who spread their messages worldwide. For this purpose, we used Gephi, an open source software used for network analysis and visualization, that allows for the exploration and visualization of large networks of any kind, in depth. The findings of this research are new, not only because of the mix of technology and methods used for extracting data from Twitter and analyzing them from different perspectives, but also because they show that social listening is a powerful method for analyzing relevant social phenomena. Listening on social networks can be used more effectively than other more traditional processes to gather data that are more costly and time consuming and lack the momentum and spontaneity of digital conversations.