Exploring Social Media and Organisational Sustainability Performance Goals: Themes, Functional Areas, and Practices Learning from the Preceding Decade

Abstract

Enterprises have increased their involvement in sustainability because of social and ecological trends and quickly changing settings. The large-scale environmental influence in attaining sustainability is a serious problem for organisations. Organisations are coping with various negative environmental challenges, and social media is one of the driving forces involved in dealing with this difficulty owing to the enormous number of users of social media. Organisations embrace social media to accomplish various goals, such as information sharing, connection building, brand development, boosting awareness, and gathering customer insights. In addition, social media is a critical factor in influencing organisational sustainability performance on an individual and group level. This paper aimed to examine social media and organisational sustainability performance goals, namely themes, functional areas, and practices in the age of social networking. Identifying the goals and themes provided us with the limitations of the research areas. The PRISMA statement 2020 was adopted to include and exclude results and extract the data from three renowned databases: Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The major themes were established using the VOSviewer software by using the occurrences of key terms and content analysis. Three major literature themes were identified: organisations and sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and social media. The results indicated that few researchers have contributed to the areas of social media and organisational sustainability performance in the past decade. However, due to the importance of social media in achieving good organisational sustainability performance, organisations have been encouraging the adoption of the use of social media for sustainable development. In addition, Twitter is a social media platform that is widely used by organisations to promote sustainability practices. This study investigated the novel concept of social media to achieve sustainability in organisations, and the results of the study showed that limited research has been conducted, and this could be further explored by researchers in future work.